# When to Hire a Computer Performance Engineering Team (2025) part 1 of 2

DevFeed: [When to Hire a Computer Performance Engineering Team (2025) part 1 of 2](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/when-to-hire-a-computer-performance-engineering-team-2025-part-1-of-2-13605.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://www.brendangregg.com/blog//2025-08-04/when-to-hire-a-computer-performance-engineering-team-2025-part1.html>)

Published: 2025-08-03T14:00:00Z

Content type: tutorial

Language: en

Sources: [Brendan Gregg's Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/brendan-gregg-s-blog.md>)

Topics: [benchmarking](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/benchmarking.md>), [Latency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/latency.md>), [Scalability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/scalability.md>), [Development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/development.md>)

Tags: [blog](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/blog.md>), [infrastructure](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/infrastructure.md>), [intel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/intel.md>), [latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/latency.md>), [netflix](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/netflix.md>), [observability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/observability.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [performance-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance-engineering.md>), [scalability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/scalability.md>)

## AI overview

This advice article explains what computer performance engineering teams do and when technology companies should consider forming one. It describes potential benefits including infrastructure cost savings, lower latency, improved scalability and reliability, and faster engineering, with a focus on non-vendor companies using significant back-end compute and AI.

## Source excerpt

As a leader in computer performance I've been asked by companies about how (and why) to form a performance engineering team, and as this is broadly useful I'll share my advice here. Large tech companies in the US hire performance engineers (under that or other titles) to ensure that infrastructure costs and service latency don't grow too high, and that their service is reliable under peak load. A new performance team can likely find enough optimizations to halve infrastructure spend in their first couple of years, even for companies that have been using commercial performance or observability tools. Performance engineers do much more than those tools, working with development teams and vendors to build, test, debug, tune, and adopt new performance solutions, and to find deep optimizations that those tools can miss. I previously worked on the performance engineering team for Netflix, a large tech consumer running on hundreds of thousands of AWS instances. I'm now doing similar work at Intel (a large tech vendor) for Intel and their customers. As a leader in this space I've also interacted with other performance teams and staff doing performance work at many companies. In this post I'll explain what these teams do and when you should consider forming one. In part 2 I'll provide sample job descriptions, specialties, advice, pitfalls, comments on AI, and what to do if you can't hire a performance team. It's easy for hardware vendors like Intel to justify hiring performance engineers, as the number one factor in sales is beating a competitor's performance. However, my focus in this post is on non-vendor tech-heavy companies who hire these staff to drive down costs and latency outliers (e.g., banks, telecomms, defence, AI, tech-based companies, and anyone else who is spending more than $1M/year on back-end compute and AI). What is the ROI of performance engineering? The main ROIs are infrastructure cost savings, latency reductions, improved scalability and reliability, an