Senior Software Performance Engineer

Job Summary

As a Senior Performance Engineer on the Behavior Planning team, you will own latency, throughput, memory utilization, and thread safety for our real-time decision-making pipeline. Working alongside staff roboticists who write high-level autonomy logic, your job is to profile the stack, enforce performance budgets, and build execution guardrails that guarantee deterministic, high-throughput execution.

Prior background in autonomous vehicles, controls, or robotics math is not required. We are seeking engineers obsessed with system performance, low-level execution concepts, and software profiling tools.

Essential Responsibilities

• System Diagnostics: Instrument the behavior pipeline to measure runtime performance, isolating latency spikes, resource contention, and memory inefficiencies.
• Pipeline Optimization: Refactor high-frequency execution loops to maximize cache utilization, eliminate dynamic memory allocations, and reduce tail latency.
• Concurrency Architecture: Re-engineer thread boundaries and synchronization logic to maximize multi-core parallel processing while ensuring thread safety.
• Performance Guardrails: Build automated micro-benchmarks and runtime telemetry into CI/CD pipelines to prevent algorithm developers from introducing performance regressions.
• API Design: Partner with autonomy teams to establish performant, low-overhead C++ module interfaces for new behavioral features.

Required Qualifications

• Systems & Hardware Knowledge: Deep understanding of CPU cache hierarchies (L1/L2/L3), memory alignment, lock-free concurrency models, and Linux OS thread scheduling.
• Profiling & Diagnostic Tooling: Hands-on experience with Linux profiling toolchains (e.g., Perf, Tracy, eBPF) and dynamic sanitizers (ASan, TSan, Valgrind).
• C++ Engineering: Strong proficiency in modern C++ (C++17/20) with a focus on writing low-overhead abstractions, RAII, and cache-friendly data layouts.
• Benchmarking Methodologies: Familiarity with micro-benchmarking frameworks (e.g., Google Benchmark) and performance-regression testing in continuous integration.
• Domain Background: Experience in performance-critical software environments such as game engines, financial technology, database runtimes, or operating system kernels.
• Degree Requirement: B.S. Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or an equivalent degree.

Desirable Qualifications

• Academic Advancement: Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Professional Depth: At least 5 years of professional experience.
• Domain Expertise: Prior experience in AV, robotics, or high-throughput real-time control systems.
• Advanced Process Ownership: Proven track record of designing and scaling automated CI/CD performance testing infrastructure.

Want to learn more about our culture & benefits? Check out our website!

May Mobility is an equal opportunity employer.  All applicants for employment will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, genetics or any other legally protected basis.   Below, you have the opportunity to share your preferred gender pronouns, gender, ethnicity, and veteran status with May Mobility to help us identify areas of improvement in our hiring and recruitment processes. Completion of these questions is entirely voluntary.  Any information you choose to provide will be kept confidential, and will not impact the hiring decision in any way. If you believe that you will need any type of accommodation, please let us know.

Note to Recruitment Agencies: May Mobility does not accept unsolicited agency resumes. Furthermore, May Mobility does not pay placement fees for candidates submitted by any agency other than its approved partners.