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

Performance engineering teams can deliver 5-10% annual infrastructure cost savings, with new teams potentially halving costs in their first two years. The article outlines when companies should hire performance engineers (starting at $1M annual infrastructure spend), what they do (testing, debugging, tuning software/hardware, developing custom tools), and provides hiring guidelines based on infrastructure spend ratios. Performance engineers focus on cost reduction, latency optimization, scalability improvements, and enabling faster development cycles through specialized expertise in system-level optimization.