Senior Performance Engineer, Data Products
WFA Digital Insight
Turquoise is looking for a senior‑level engineer who can turn raw, massive healthcare data into a faster, more responsive user experience. Unlike generic data‑engineer posts, this job demands a product‑mindset: you’ll own the full performance loop from spotting slow queries to reshaping data architecture and influencing front‑end behavior. The emphasis on ClickHouse Cloud and real‑time latency forecasts signals a team that treats performance as a core product feature, not an afterthought. Expect deep collaboration with product, front‑end, and back‑end engineers, and a mandate to turn analytical findings into concrete production gains. Candidates who can balance rigorous benchmarking with pragmatic trade‑offs will thrive here.
Job Description
This is a fully remote role within the United States. We’re looking for a product-minded Senior Performance Engineer to improve how our products interact with large, complex healthcare datasets. This role uses Data Science skills to drive Product Experience outcomes, by iterating to improve the performance of our Data Platform. The work is analytical, and the outcome is practical: a faster, more scalable product. You’ll investigate existing performance problems, anticipate the impact of future product and dataset changes, shipping improvements across the full system—from data architecture and query execution to API request patterns and user experience. Success in this role means being able to demonstrate outcomes such as: - A critical filter and data-source combination is now x% faster in production - An incoming dataset change is expected to increase latency by y%, and we have a mitigation plan before launch - A product workflow now uses z% fewer ClickHouse resources without compromising the user experience RESPONSIBILITIES - Own performance investigations across the product and data stack, moving from slow queries or poor user experiences to measurable root causes and production improvements - Design and evaluate data architecture changes - Partner with Product, frontend, and backend engineers to adapt product behavior to the characteristics of the underlying data through techniques such as request batching, debouncing, caching, pagination… - Develop representative benchmarks for important combinations of filters, datasets, and product workflows - Measure query latency, throughput, concurrency, and infrastructure consumption, with particular attention to datastore performance and cost (we use ClickHouse Cloud) - Evaluate the likely performance impact of upstream dataset changes before they reach production - Assess future product requests and recommend technical or product approaches that balance functionality, responsiveness, scalability, and cost - Prototype competing solutions, clearly communicate their tradeoffs, and validate the selected approach in production - Improve performance instrumentation, monitoring, and regression detection across data-powered product experiences - Establish reusable patterns and capabilities as the Data Product platform becomes a supporting layer for additional products and teams WHAT YOU’LL BRING TO THE ROLE - 5+ years of experience building and optimizing production data systems, data-intensive applications, or analytical products - Advanced SQL skills and strong proficiency with Python or another general-purpose programming language - Experience optimizing analytical workloads in column-oriented databases or data warehouses - Experience changing how data is organized or stored to improve application performance. Examples may include restructuring tables, precomputing results, changing indexes, or optimizing how data is queried.
- Experience using query plans, profiling, benchmarks, and production telemetry to diagnose performance problems - Ability to reason across system boundaries, including databases, APIs, backend services, client request patterns, and product interactions - A hypothesis-driven approach to performance work: define the problem, establish a baseline, test alternatives, and quantify the production result - A mindset of connecting technical work to user or business outcomes - Your own product judgment, the ability to identify cases where changing the product experience is more effective than changing the underlying data system BONUS POINTS - Experience with ClickHouse - Experience contributing to data-heavy search, filtering, analytics, or reporting products - Experience with healthcare specific data types: claims, contract rates, revenue cycle, medical billing, or healthcare pricing experience BENEFITS - Competitive pay with equity options - Stellar healthcare plan options, including Medical, Dental, and Vision, with FSA, DCFSA, and HSA options - Company-sponsored disability and life insurance - Unlimited PTO - 401(k) with 4% matching - Fully remote work and flexible working hours - $750 work-from-home setup budget - Paid biannual in-person company summits - Quarterly $150 co-hanging stipend to meet with coworkers - Monthly $100 health and wellness benefit - Generous paid family leave - Annual $1,200 learning and development stipend ABOUT TURQUOISE HEALTH Turquoise Health is a Series C price transparency platform for finance leaders across healthcare.
How to Stand Out
- Highlight concrete performance improvements you’ve delivered (e.g., query latency reductions, cost savings) in your resume and interview anecdotes.
- Prepare a short case study showing how you benchmarked a slow query, identified the root cause, and implemented a fix.
- Demonstrate familiarity with ClickHouse or similar column‑store databases; even a quick hands‑on project can set you apart.
- Emphasize your ability to communicate trade‑offs clearly to product and engineering partners.
- Bring examples of hypothesis‑driven experimentation, showing baseline metrics and post‑change results.
- Ask about the team’s current monitoring stack and performance instrumentation to show proactive interest.
- When discussing compensation, reference the equity component and ask about remote‑work allowances to ensure the full package aligns with your expectations.
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