Performance Engineer
Posted Jul 13, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Oct 6, 2026
Likely interview questions for this role
Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.
About your past
Walk me through a time you shaved latency out of a system. What was the bottleneck, how did you find it, and how much did you improve it by?
What they are checking: whether they have hands-on experience with real low-latency optimization work, not just theory
Tell me about a time your performance analysis using statistics led you to a conclusion that turned out to be wrong. What did you miss?
What they are checking: intellectual honesty and understanding of statistical pitfalls like noise, outliers, and small sample sizes
Describe a project where you had to work closely with traders or quants who didn't have a deep technical background. How did you bridge that gap?
What they are checking: collaboration and communication skills across disciplines, which the posting explicitly emphasizes
Tell me about a time you had to convince a team to make a costly infrastructure change based on your performance data. Did they push back, and what happened?
What they are checking: ability to turn data into influence and handle skepticism from stakeholders
What would you do
Suppose you get a new NIC or server to evaluate. How would you design a benchmark to decide if it's worth deploying at an exchange colo?
What they are checking: ability to design rigorous, statistically sound hardware evaluation methodology
Say a trading strategy team tells you their fills got worse after a network change you approved. How do you investigate and what do you tell them?
What they are checking: how they handle ambiguous cross-team problems and communicate under pressure with non-engineers
Markets move fast and exchange behavior changes. How would you go about analyzing a new or unfamiliar exchange protocol to find where we're losing competitiveness?
What they are checking: comfort with ambiguity and self-directed technical investigation in a domain unique to trading
About the work
How would you profile a trading engine to figure out where the time is going, from wire to order sent?
What they are checking: depth of knowledge in end-to-end latency measurement across hardware and software layers
Tell me about the difference between throughput and latency optimization and a case where improving one hurt the other.
What they are checking: whether the candidate understands tradeoffs instead of chasing a single metric blindly
What's your experience tuning the operating system or kernel for low latency work, things like CPU isolation, interrupt affinity, or NUMA?
What they are checking: concrete, specific systems-level tuning experience beyond generic performance talk
How do you approach writing performant C++ or Python, and what are some common patterns you avoid because they cost you in the hot path?
What they are checking: real coding depth around performance-sensitive language features, not just familiarity with syntax
If you had to reduce time-to-order by even a microsecond, where would you look first in a typical trading system architecture?
What they are checking: structured thinking about where latency actually accumulates in a real trading stack
What statistical tools or experimental design methods have you used to separate real performance signal from noise in a live production environment?
What they are checking: practical familiarity with experimental rigor as opposed to ad hoc benchmarking
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Practice this out loudThe full job description
As published by Akuna Capital.