**Introduction** At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world’s leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You’ll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM’s product and technology landscape. Here, you’ll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world. **Your role and responsibilities** IBM is seeking a results-oriented experienced Performance Engineer to support our benchmarking engineering initiatives. This is a critical role that ensures our software solutions meet the highest standards of performance, scalability, and reliability. You will work with a lean, high-performing engineering team to power these efforts and collaborate closely with watsonx engineering teams. You will be responsible for defining scopes of work, architecting and optimizing software deployments, creating test plans and analyzing and summarizing results. Your expertise in performance engineering will be vital in identifying the most relevant industry benchmarks and designing effective testing methodologies. * Identify or define the most applicable industry benchmarks or performance tests for our products that align to our strategic differentiation. * Architect and tune software deployments on hyperscaler infrastructure. * Design benchmarking testing plans. * Provide technical leadership and guidance on performance testing strategies, methodologies, and tools for a team of benchmarking engineers. * Analyze performance test results and collaborate with product management to craft strategy. * Collaborate with performance engineering and development teams to drive optimizations within Data Platform products. * Ensure that testing is executed rigorously and delivers high-quality, actionable results. **Required technical and professional expertise** * Deep expertise in technical benchmarking, performance engineering, solution architecture, or a similar technical role * Solid understanding of performance testing concepts, methodologies, and hands-on experience with industry-standard benchmarks in the following areas: * SQL * Query Plan analysis and SQL optimization * Advanced Database Benchmarking * Code Profiling (Enable instrumentation) and analysis * C++ Code optimization * Script/Tools development (TPC-DS, JMeter) * Proven ability to analyze complex technical data and communicate findings to both technical and non-technical audiences * Proven ability to contribute to existing benchmarks or build test scripts from scratch * Expertise in CI/CD pipeline * Strong project management and organizational skills. **Preferred technical and professional experience** * Experience in a technical leadership role. * Experience with system architecture, including cloud-native technologies, distributed systems, databases (including Ansible/Terraform for IaC) * Knowledge of IBM's software portfolio, particularly in data and AI * Knowledge of IBM Cloud, AWS or Azure IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.