Performance Engineer

The Opportunity

Coupa makes margins multiply through its community-generated AI and industry-leading total spend management platform for businesses large and small. Coupa AI is informed by trillions of dollars of direct and indirect spend data across a global network of 10M+ buyers and suppliers. We empower you with the ability to predict, prescribe, and automate smarter, more profitable business decisions to improve operating margins.

Why join Coupa?

• Pioneering Technology: At Coupa, we're at the forefront of innovation, leveraging the latest technology to empower our customers with greater efficiency and visibility in their spend.
• Collaborative Culture: We value collaboration and teamwork, and our culture is driven by transparency, openness, and a shared commitment to excellence.
• Global Impact: Join a company where your work has a global, measurable impact on our clients, the business, and each other.

Learn more on Life at Coupa blog and hear from our employees about their experiences working at Coupa.

We are looking for a highly experienced Senior/Lead Performance Engineer with 12+ years of experience to drive system performance, scalability, and reliability across the Coupa platform. In this role, you will lead performance engineering initiatives for enterprise cloud systems and integrate cutting-edge AI/LLM performance engineering and testing methodologies to optimize both traditional microservices and AI-driven platform capabilities

What You Will Do:

• Benchmarking & Certification: Establish performance benchmarks for the Coupa platform and design, implement, and maintain an automated performance certification test harness.
• AI & Platform Performance Testing: Design load, stress, latency, and concurrency testing suites for AI/LLM workloads (e.g., token generation speed, TTFT—Time to First Token, inference throughput, model server capacity, and retrieval augmented generation/RAG pipeline performance).
• Troubleshooting & Optimization: Troubleshoot complex configuration, infrastructure, networking, application, and AI/ML model deployment problems impacting system performance or capacity.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with Product Management, Development Engineering, AI/ML Engineering, and Cloud Infrastructure teams to determine optimal ways to scale enterprise applications and underlying infrastructure.
• System Optimization: Provide technical leadership to improve overall system performance, capacity, reliability, cost-efficiency, and scalability (including GPU/CPU compute optimization for AI models).
• Observability & Monitoring: Monitor and manage production performance using modern DevOps tools, continuous automation, and comprehensive AI observability stacks.
• Proactive Analysis: Conduct proactive end-to-end cluster scalability, performance, and exception analysis across multi-cloud environments.
• Root Cause & Latency Analysis: Analyze root causes for latency in individual components, database layer, network hops, and AI pipeline dependencies (e.g., vector database lookups, context window processing).
• Continuous Improvement: Continually evaluate opportunities to modernize our platform, improve process efficiency, and maximize business impact.
• Thought Leadership: Serve as an evangelist for performance engineering best practices, modern load testing tools, and AI performance frameworks across the organization.

What You Will Bring to Coupa:

• Experience: 12+ years of hands-on experience in Performance Engineering, Analysis, and troubleshooting of complex production systems.
• Domain Expertise: Deep domain expertise in public cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure), distributed systems, microservices architectures, container orchestration (Kubernetes), and enterprise capacity planning.
• AI / ML Performance Engineering:
• Systems & Low-Level Fundamentals: Demonstrated knowledge of system software internals; deep understanding of how locking, caching, concurrency, compute (CPU/GPU), memory, and I/O impact software and AI model performance.
• End-to-End Tuning: Proven track record of performance tuning across infrastructure, databases, platform layers, and application code.
• Observability & APM: Hands-on experience with distributed tracing, logging, and metrics collection using tools like New Relic, Grafana, Kibana, Datadog, and AI-focused observability tools (e.g., LangSmith, Arize, Phoenix, OpenTelemetry).
• Tech Stack Proficiency:
• Leadership & Communication: Proven ability to bring clarity to ambiguous technical scenarios, facilitate architecture reviews, arbitrate high-stakes technical discussions, and make tough recommendations in a distributed global team environment.
• Education: BS or MS degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent experience).

The successful candidate's starting salary will be determined based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location.

At Coupa, we are 100% committed to creating and nurturing an environment that supports your physical, mental, and community well-being. We offer a comprehensive suite of benefits designed to help you and your family thrive:

Global Well-Being Perks (For All Employees Globally)

• Global Wellness Days: Enjoy two designated, company-wide paid wellness days off each year (typically the first Friday in March and the last Friday in September) so the entire global team can unplug, step away, and recharge together.
• Birthday Time-Off: Celebrate your day! Coupa provides a paid day off on your birthday or another day of your choice within your birthday month.
• Volunteer Time Off (VTO): Giving back is in our DNA. We offer 40 hours of paid VTO annually to support the community initiatives and volunteer programs you are passionate about.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP): Access free, confidential, 24/7/365 counseling and resources for emotional support, work-life solutions, financial advice, legal guidance, and support for new parents.
• Business Travel Protection: Travel with peace of mind. Zurich Travel Assist provides medical, safety, pre-trip planning, and emergency support during any business travel.
• Referral Bonus Program: Share the Coupa experience! Receive generous monetary referral bonuses when you successfully refer talented friends or acquaintances who are hired into open roles.

Please note: In addition to these global well-being perks, Coupa offers highly competitive, location-specific benefits packages (which include comprehensive medical/dental insurance, retirement/pension plans, and life or accident protection) tailored to your primary work location. Your recruiter will walk you through the specific regional benefits package for this role during the interview process.

Coupa complies with relevant laws and regulations regarding equal opportunity and offers a welcoming and inclusive work environment. Decisions related to hiring, compensation, training, or evaluating performance are made fairly, and we provide equal employment opportunities to all qualified candidates and employees.

Please be advised that inquiries or resumes from recruiters will not be accepted.

By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read Coupa's Privacy Policy and understand that Coupa receives/collects your application, including your personal data, for the purposes of managing Coupa's ongoing recruitment and placement activities, including for employment purposes in the event of a successful application and for notification of future job opportunities if you did not succeed the first time. You will find more details about how your application is processed, the purposes of processing, and how long we retain your application in our Privacy Policy.