Principal Platform Performance Engineer

Austin: The "Domain" area | Hybrid (Minimum 4 days in office)

At Kizen, we build technology that makes AI actually work for people.

Our platform helps organizations automate the workflows that matter most — from helping insurance agents manage contracting and commissions, to enabling healthcare providers to deliver proactive patient care, to empowering financial institutions to classify documents and extract data automatically.

And that’s just the beginning. With Kizen, developers can build new enterprise applications, while business users can customize dashboards and agents using AI, low-code, or code — all on the same platform. The possibilities are limited only by imagination.

What used to take months or years to build, configure, and connect now takes just days. Kizen combines powerful pre-built agents and use cases with an enterprise platform for automation and data connection — all built on an AI-first architecture that’s easy to adopt, scale, and trust.

We’re not chasing hype. We’re solving real operational problems and helping the world’s most complex organizations work faster, smarter, and more humanely.

Join us in transforming how industries work — one workflow, one agent, and one customer success story at a time.

Are you an awesome IC who prefers communicating with objective data instead of arguing with product managers over UI features? Do you want to own the performance and reliability of an enterprise-grade platform performing millions of business-critical operations every hour?

We’re looking for a highly experienced engineer who can drive our performance and scaling effort. You will discover optimizations that yield order-of-magnitude improvement to latency or throughput. You’ll own stability issues from the time of discovery until you get to a root cause. You’ll perform load and stress testing, analyze production metrics, and produce clear, data-driven recommendations that drive product and infrastructure decisions.

This is a hands-on role focused on technical depth, not management. As Principal Platform Performance Engineer, you’ll be working directly with the Director of Platform Engineering to ensure Kizen is fast, scalable, and stable.

• You’re independent and curious – you’ll have ownership of the problem from discovery until a root cause is identified.
• You’re a stellar communicator – many of the scaling and performance issues you uncover will require a team effort.
• You love to understand customer impact to help inform which effort has the highest ROI

• Run load/stress tests to discover performance bottlenecks in Python services, PostgreSQL, Kafka, ClickHouse and distributed components.
• Investigate and diagnose the causes of performance issues and scaling limits - including indexing issues, lock contention, database tuning, etc
• Monitor and maintain production logs and metrics related to scaling and performance
• Produce concise engineering briefs with measurement-backed recommendations.
• Implement quick wins like index improvements, configuration changes and query optimizations directly

• BA/BS or higher in Computer Science/Engineering or equivalent professional experience
• 8+ years experience working on distributed cloud applications (AWS preferred)
• Deep PostgreSQL expertise: sharding, query plans and optimization, indexing, partitioning, bloat, TOAST, storage tuning
• 5+ Years of experience with complex Python applications (Django preferred), including profiling and optimization techniques
• Ability to design and run realistic load/stress/performance tests and produce detailed reports with actionable recommendations
• Experience with Kubernetes and Helm, understanding of containerization, resource tuning, debugging and optimizing distributed systems
• Experience with Kafka (consumer groups, rebalancing strategies, partitioning algorithms, failure modes, estimating latency/throughput, tuning configuration)
• Strong communication skills: clear performance briefs, risk analysis, architectural impact summaries

We’re a fast-growing company that values innovation, growth, and continuous improvement. By joining Kizen, you’ll play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the company while enjoying a supportive, dynamic, and collaborative workplace. You’ll have opportunities for professional development, impact, and career advancement.

• Career Growth Opportunities
• Engaging Work Culture
• Top-Tier Compensation
• Equity Package
• Healthcare Coverage
• Professional Development Stipends
• PTO

Kizen is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture that celebrates authenticity to win as one. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, protected veteran status, citizenship or immigration status, or any other legally protected characteristics. At Kizen, we fully comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We are dedicated to embracing challenges and creating an accessible, inclusive workplace for all individuals.

The base salary range for this position is $180,000-$230,000. However, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to base salary, we also offer generous equity and benefits packages.

If you’re excited about creating impactful experiences and contributing to a fast-paced, people-focused team, we’d love to meet you!

OTE - $207,000 - $264,000