Performance Engineer

Scope:

Seeking an exceptional Senior Performance Engineer with 12-16+ years of relevant experience, a deep technical expertise and proven leadership capabilities. This senior technical leader will drive performance execution decisions, contribute to the team roadmap, mentor team members, and work closely with the broader engineering team across the full development and deployment lifecycle, apply proven performance engineering best practices, and drive their execution in partnership with both platform and product teams.

Our current technical environment:

Software: Java (enterprise)/Scala, JMeter, Gatling, Taurus, BlazeMeter, Appium/Selenium, Elastic/Kibana, SSMS, IntelliJ/VS Code, Linux, Jira, Git, GitHub Cloud Architecture: Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes, Docker Frameworks/Others: JVM, SQL & NoSQL databases, KQL (Kibana Query Language), CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions)

What you’ll do:

• Lead performance architecture and test execution activities for existing and new products in the Cognitive Execution portfolio.
• Design, modify, and optimize performance tests using JMeter, Gatling or similar tools (Expert level), and establish reusable frameworks, workload models, and execution standards adopted across the team.
• Execute and oversee performance, load, and benchmark tests; own analysis, status reporting, and stakeholder communication during active release cycles.
• Publish comprehensive performance test reports and communicate findings to DevOps and development teams for triage and resolution.
• Lead blameless root cause investigations of performance issues, guide development teams to fix those rather than their symptoms; hold the team accountable to root-cause thinking as a practice. Turn them into concrete, prioritized improvements in product and performance test cases.
• Inspire fellow engineers to raise their technical craft: give practical, hands-on guidance on writing cleaner code, more effective tests, and simpler test architectures.
• Help other team members arrive at simpler, more robust, and more efficient designs through coaching rather than prescribing solutions.
• Support team management in prioritizing backlog items. Translate business requirements to user stories and actively seek feedback from stakeholders.
• Participate in team activities such as backlog grooming, planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives.
• Make impediments transparent, communicate them clearly with practical alternatives, and help others overcome theirs.
• Participate in and help shape team hiring: identify skill gaps and influence job requirements for future performance engineering needs.

What we are looking for:

• Bachelor's degree in STEM (or equivalent practical experience).
• 12-16+ years of relevant experience in software performance engineering with a proven track record of technical leadership, mentorship and cross-team influence.
• Expert-level performance engineering execution with a track record of setting strategy and standards, not just executing test plans.
• Demonstrated leadership in pushing teams towards better quality software and helping team members develop simpler, more robust test designs.
• JMeter, Gatling, Taurus, or similar load/performance testing tools: Expert.
  • Design, modify, and maintain complex performance test scripts, frameworks, and reusable assets across products.
  • Experience with BlazeMeter (or similar) as an execution/orchestration platform for test runs and result analysis.
• Java code comprehension for performance analysis: Advanced.
  • able to read, reason about, and coach others on code-level root causes of performance issues.
• Appium/Selenium for UI performance testing.
• SQL and database performance tuning: Expert.
  • Prevent slow queries and optimize SQL for faster execution.
  • Identify bottlenecks, including locking/contention, and lead resolution efforts.
  • Recommend and validate query improvements and indexing strategies.
  • Strong fundamentals in query complexity analysis, transactions, locking behavior, and execution plan analysis.
  • Diagnose root causes (not just symptoms) of query performance issues.
• SQL and NoSQL database concepts: Expert knowledge, with the ability to evaluate trade-offs between technologies and guide architecture decisions.
• JVM fundamentals: Advanced.
  • Memory leaks: diagnose and resolve, and coach others through troubleshooting.
  • Garbage collection (GC) impact on latency and throughput, and how to tune for it.
  • Optimize JVM configurations for improved application performance across services.
  • Conduct heap dump analysis and performance profiling and mentor others in the technique.
• Observability and monitoring tools: Advanced (hands-on).
  • Practical, expert experience with Elastic/Splunk/Datadog (or equivalent).
  • Ability to query application logs in Elastic/Kibana and write KQL (or equivalent queries).
  • Extract and analyze information related to performance (memory, CPU, latency, throughput, etc.).
  • Correlate application logs with performance metrics to independently identify and communicate root causes.
• Tools Familiarity: Linux, Jira, Git, GitHub, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, IntelliJ/Eclipse, SSMS.
• Azure (or equivalent cloud platform): Intermediate. Solid Kubernetes and Docker concepts, including operational/cost implications at scale.
• Nice to Have
  • Warehouse Management Solutions (WMS) domain knowledge.
  • Supply chain domain understanding.
  • Contributions to open-source projects or technical communities.
  • Conference presentations or published articles on performance engineering.