Staff Software Performance Engineer – Team Lead

Staff Software Performance Engineer – Team Lead Overview

Arm’s Userspace Performance team is seeking an experienced software performance analysis engineer to take on a leadership role guiding a small group of engineers. The work centres on understanding, diagnosing, and improving the performance of software running on Arm systems used around the world. This position combines hands-on technical investigation with team leadership, mentoring, and coordination of delivery.

The team is made up of software engineers who are motivated by solving difficult problems and helping shape the future of computing. Their work often involves complex software stacks with many interacting layers, and they focus on finding the real causes of performance issues rather than treating symptoms. They collaborate closely with internal tooling specialists, other teams across Arm, and external partners, including open-source communities, to build a deeper understanding of bottlenecks and identify effective improvements. Their findings can also influence hardware design decisions for future products.

What you will do

• Lead a small engineering group working on software performance analysis and optimisation.
• Make sure the team’s work is organised, prioritised, and delivered on schedule.
• Carry out people management responsibilities for direct reports.
• Encourage ongoing learning and development within the team.
• Investigate large and complex codebases to improve performance across different aspects of the software.
• Work with colleagues across Arm, as well as with external partners and open-source communities, to solve performance problems.
• Help shape the strategy for identifying bottlenecks and deciding what should be examined next.
• Write up analysis results clearly so the team and wider organisation can benefit from the knowledge.
• Prepare reports and presentations for stakeholders and other interested parties.
• Support the team in handling similar issues in the future by sharing lessons learned.
• Work across a range of environments, including the latest hardware, FPGA platforms, and software models of upcoming designs.
• Contribute insights that may help guide future hardware design choices.

What we are looking for

• Strong analytical and problem-solving ability.
• At least two years of management experience, with a history of delivering high-quality work on time.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain complicated ideas clearly.
• Very strong C and C++ programming ability.
• Practical experience profiling and tracing large applications to locate performance bottlenecks.
• Confidence writing documentation and mentoring less experienced engineers.
• Excellent spoken and written English.

Additional experience that would be useful

• Interest in coaching others and helping the team expand its capabilities.
• Understanding of how demanding software workloads such as web servers, databases, mobile apps, and similar systems behave from a performance standpoint.
• Knowledge of operating system concepts such as processes, threads, locks, and virtual memory, and how these affect application performance.
• Awareness of system architecture details such as pipelines, caches, MMUs, interconnects, timers, and multithreading.
• Familiarity with compiler optimisation techniques.
• Ability to reason about compiler-generated assembly code.
• Experience with open-source project development and contribution processes.
• Understanding of Arm architecture and Arm tools.

Team and culture

You will join a group that values collaboration, curiosity, and technical excellence. The team works on hard performance problems, often across multiple layers of software, and partners with other specialists inside Arm to uncover root causes and improve outcomes. Arm also highlights a culture of regular career conversations, Friday focus time, and a strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Rewards and support

Arm describes its broader employee offering as covering health and wellbeing, work-life balance, financial rewards, and development support. The company emphasises a collaborative office environment and a sense of working together as one organisation. If you need support during the hiring process, Arm can provide accommodations such as breaks between interviews, documents being read aloud, or help with office accessibility.

Working arrangement

This role follows Arm’s hybrid working approach. The company aims to balance face-to-face collaboration with flexibility, and the exact pattern for this position will be shared during the application process. Arm notes that the amount of flexibility available can sometimes be affected by local legal, regulatory, tax, or other requirements, and the team will work with candidates to find the best workable arrangement.

Important additional information

There is no relocation package available for this position. If the successful candidate requires Skilled Worker sponsorship, Arm will pay the employer-side sponsorship costs. However, the candidate will be responsible for all personal immigration expenses, including the visa application fee and the Immigration Health Surcharge.

Arm is an equal opportunity employer and says it provides a respectful environment where applicants and employees are treated fairly regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.

The salary range for this role is £97,300 to £131,700 per year.

To apply, use the application link on the job page and submit your details through Arm’s recruitment process.

Degree Requirement: Not Specified

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