Senior/Principal Performance Engineer

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><strong>CIQ OVERVIEW</strong></span></p> <p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">CIQ builds the enterprise infrastructure that powers the world's most demanding workloads. From the operating system layer through AI infrastructure, high-performance computing, and cloud-native orchestration, CIQ delivers the speed, security, scalability, and sovereignty that major enterprises, government agencies, and research institutions depend on.</span></p> <p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux and the developer of the RLC Pro family of Enterprise Linux distributions, Fuzzball workload orchestration, Warewulf Pro cluster provisioning, and Ascender Pro automation. Our customers include some of the largest and most technically sophisticated organizations in the world, working across HPC, AI/ML, defense, and regulated industries.</span></p> <p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">We are a company of builders, operators, and open source practitioners. If you want to do work that matters, at a company that is genuinely changing how enterprise infrastructure gets built and run, we want to talk.</span></p></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">CIQ is seeking a highly experienced Senior or Principal Performance Engineer to own and drive system-level and application-level performance across our product portfolio. This is an AI-first role, both in methodology and focus area,  and the right candidate will bring deep expertise in operating system internals, kernel and userspace performance, and the performance demands of modern AI workloads, HPC environments, general-purpose computing, and production service workloads.</span></p> <p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">In this role, you will be the standard-bearer for performance at CIQ. Our performance-focused solutions must always be the fastest in the industry, and you will be responsible for ensuring that remains true. You will be intimately involved with Fuzzball, CIQ's cloud-native computing platform, learning its architecture end-to-end and integrating workloads - both user-facing and CI/testing pipelines - directly through it.</span></p> <p style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Position Summary</span></strong></p> <p style="text-align: justify;"><em><span style="font-size: 12pt;">This role is leveled as Senior or Principal based on qualifications and demonstrated capabilities.</span></em></p> <p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em>Benchmarking & Profiling</em></strong></span></p> <ul style="text-align: justify;"> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Design, develop, and maintain comprehensive benchmarking frameworks spanning OS, kernel, and application layers.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Profile workloads across CPU, memory, I/O, network, and accelerator (GPU/NPU) subsystems to identify bottlenecks and optimization opportunities.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Establish and own performance baselines across CIQ's product and solutions portfolio.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Leverage AI-assisted tooling and agentic workflows to accelerate profiling, analysis, and root cause identification.</span></li> </ul> <p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em>Regression Detection & Resolution</em></strong></span></p> <ul style="text-align: justify;"> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Build and maintain automated performance regression-detection pipelines integrated into CI/CD workflows using Fuzzball.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Identify, triage, and resolve regressions across user space, kernel space, and application layers with urgency and rigor.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Collaborate across engineering teams to root-cause regressions introduced by upstream kernel changes, compiler updates, or library modifications.</span></li> </ul> <p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><strong><em>Proactive Performance Engineering</em></strong></span></p> <ul style="text-align: justify;"> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Drive proactive performance improvements - not just reactive fixes - to keep CIQ solutions ahead of the competition across every layer of the stack.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Own core operating system performance: kernel…