Performance Engineer

About the role

We're looking for an exceptional Performance Engineer to join our growing technology organization. Interviewing at PDT is intentionally focused on finding great people who can build long-term, impactful careers with us.

Performance Engineers at PDT are responsible for deeply understanding and optimizing the systems that enable our trading strategies at scale. You will work at the intersection of software, systems, and hardware to analyze performance, drive infrastructure efficiency, and free up critical compute capacity.

Your work directly amplifies researcher velocity and scales our core models, creating massive impact through both cost savings and accelerated innovation. You'll thrive at PDT if you love open-ended problems, diving into GPU optimization and system optimization/design, and are excited to take your discoveries all the way to production at scale.

This is a hybrid position and will require the person to work from our New York City office at a minimum of 3 days a week.

Key Responsibilities

• Analyze and understand end-to-end system performance to enhance researcher throughput and velocity.
• Work across the OS, kernel, networking stack, storage subsystems, memory hierarchy, and CPU layers to optimize compute resource utilization.
• Perform deep-dive analysis using Linux performance tools to identify bottlenecks, latency outliers, and non-scalable patterns.
• Read and understand software layers, from application code through language runtimes, system libraries, and kernel code paths, providing suggestions/PRs that optimize critical paths.
• Free up capacity, reduce costs, and scale models by improving computational efficiency through tuning, configuration, and architectural changes.
• Develop systems to improve performance telemetry and observability
• Conduct proof-of-concept evaluations of new performance technologies (new kernel features, alternative system libraries) and contribute to system design decisions.
• Work collaboratively with development teams to catch performance regressions, review performance-sensitive code, and share optimization learnings across the organization

Additional information

Below is a list of skills and experiences we think are relevant. Even if you don't think you're a perfect match, we still encourage you to apply because we are committed to developing our people.

• Linux internals expertise: kernel subsystems, scheduling, memory management, virtual memory, cgroups, namespaces, and the networking stack.
• Performance tooling: proficiency with perf, eBPF, Ftrace, strace, sysstat, and related tracing/profiling tools. Ability to develop custom tooling when existing tools fall short.
• Systems-level optimization: Experience tuning system and application performance via sysctls, scheduler policies, NUMA topology awareness, memory allocators, network tunables, and storage I/O configuration.
• Hardware-software interface: Deep understanding of CPU microarchitecture, cache hierarchies, memory subsystems, hardware performance counters, and how software behavior maps to hardware reality.
• Versatile coding ability: Comfortable reading and contributing to code across multiple languages (C, C++, Python, Go, Rust, Java) and navigating unfamiliar codebases quickly.
• Observability and telemetry: Experience building or integrating monitoring and observability infrastructure (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Collaborative and communicative: Ability to analyze performance holistically and to effectively communicate findings, trade-offs, and recommendations to development teams and stakeholders.

Pay and benefits

The salary range for this role is between $195,000 and $225,000. This range is not inclusive of any potential bonus amounts. Factors that may impact the agreed upon salary within the range for a particular candidate include years of experience, level of education obtained, skill set, and other external factors.

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