Principal Enterprise & Database Competitive Performance Engineer

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The Competitive Advanced Performance (CAP) team is a new, visible capability focused on predicting, validating and explaining competitive server CPU performance before products reach the market. Joining now means helping define the methods, tools and operating model from the ground up.

AMD is seeking an end-to-end performance engineer to own the enterprise and database workloads where CPU behavior, memory hierarchy, software tuning, consolidation and platform economics determine competitive outcomes. You will be the team's primary workload authority for AMD EPYC versus Intel Xeon and will also evaluate Arm platforms as they enter enterprise use cases. The role combines deployment, tuning, profiling, root-cause analysis, reproducibility and clear technical communication.   THE PERSON:   You do more than operate benchmarks. You can tune a full software stack, diagnose why a result changed, separate CPU limits from storage, network, runtime and configuration effects, and build a method that another lab can reproduce. You understand that the most useful result is not simply who won, but which mechanisms drove the outcome and     KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:   Define and maintain an enterprise workload taxonomy spanning relational databases, Java, analytics, virtualization, consolidation and other priority server applications. Develop rigorous methods for throughput, latency, tail latency, scale-up and scale-out behavior, consolidation and service-level objectives. Analyze AMD versus Intel performance with attention to core configuration, frequency and power behavior, acceleration features, memory capacity and bandwidth, and platform setup. Evaluate compiler, JVM, database, kernel and library tuning so comparisons reflect realistic deployment choices rather than accidental configuration gaps. Use profiling and counters to explain CPU stalls, memory behavior, locks and contention, NUMA placement, storage or network dependencies and software bottlenecks. Measure performance-per-watt, consolidation and platform or rack TCO drivers where licensing and density matter. Translate bottleneck evidence into future architecture and performance assumptions with the architecture and forecasting teams. Maintain configuration manifests, runbooks and methodology control so results can withstand peer, partner and customer scrutiny. Create deep-dive technical reports and concise executive content showing AMD lead areas, risk areas, root causes and possible mitigations. Support fast post-launch analysis and use measured results to improve future forecasts.

Extensive hands-on performance engineering experience with enterprise or server applications at scale. Experience with relational or distributed databases, Java or JVM performance, analytics engines, virtualization or hypervisors. Demonstrated ability to tune full software stacks and distinguish CPU limitations from storage, network, runtime and configuration artifacts. Strong Linux and system-administration skills, including scripting and repeatable environment setup. Experience with profiling tools, hardware performance counters, NUMA analysis and system-level tuning. Strong understanding of throughput, latency, scaling, saturation, consolidation and service-level metrics. Clear technical writing and presentation skills, with high standards for benchmark fairness, documentation