Performance Engineer - Senior

Location: Southlake, TX Salary: $64.00 USD Hourly - $69.00 USD Hourly Description:
Job Title: Senior Performance Engineer

Location: Southlake, TX (Preferred) or Ann Arbor, MI (Backup) - Hybrid: 4 days on-site per week

Duration: 12-Month Contract-to-Hire

About the job

At our leading financial services firm, we are seeking a Senior Performance Engineer to join our flagship trading platform engineering team. This individual-contributor role independently plans and delivers performance and resiliency initiatives for a highly complex, Java-based trading platform, with a strict focus on latency, scalability, reliability, and resiliency.

The engineer will build workloads and tools, identify code and system bottlenecks, and recommend improvements across client, server, gateway, infrastructure, and cloud environments. This role requires deep Core Java knowledge and exceptional diagnostic skills to read source code, analyze JVM and system behavior, evaluate production traffic patterns, and translate findings into actionable recommendations for code, configuration, capacity, and system design.

Responsibilities

• Independently plan and deliver performance, scalability, resiliency, and capacity validation for assigned enterprise systems.
• Learn complex system architectures, business flows, dependencies, workloads, and production behaviors.
• Define requirements, workloads, acceptance criteria, and reports in collaboration with cross-functional partner teams.
• Build performance test scripts, workload generators, mock services, test frameworks, and automation tools.
• Execute comprehensive load, stress, endurance, scalability, failover, recovery, degradation, and resiliency tests.
• Analyze source code, JVM behavior, system resources, databases, networks, logs, metrics, and end-to-end latency.
• Recommend and validate code, configuration, infrastructure, database, capacity, design, and resiliency improvements (including Circuit Breakers, Shapers, Load Balancers, and Failover configurations).
• Establish production behavior as the baseline for workload design, capacity planning, risk analysis, and validation.
• Maintain observability dashboards, reports, diagnostic tools, runbooks, testing frameworks, and workload libraries.
• Evaluate new testing, profiling, observability, and resiliency tools to modernize the engineering stack.
• Leverage approved automation and AI tools to improve scripting, analysis, documentation, and system diagnostics.
• Communicate test results, risks, architecture recommendations, and open issues clearly to technical and leadership stakeholders.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5+ years of experience in performance testing, scalability, software engineering, or production performance analysis.
• Strong background in performance, scalability, failover, recovery, and resiliency testing.
• At least 2 years of hands-on Java development experience.
• Deep Core Java knowledge, including JVM internals, concurrency, multithreading, memory management, garbage collection, and latency optimization.
• Proven ability to analyze source code and recommend code-level improvements, diagnosing bottlenecks using thread dumps, logs, profilers, metrics, and observability tools.
• Experience building workload generators, utilities, mock services, or automation using Java, Scala, Python, shell scripting, JMeter, Gatling, or similar tools.
• Strong working knowledge of Linux, databases, application servers, caching, connection pools, distributed systems, and networks.
• Expertise in establishing workloads, baselines, thresholds, capacity measures, acceptance criteria, SLOs, SLAs, and KPIs.
• Proficiency with enterprise monitoring tools such as Splunk and Grafana.
• Hands-on experience testing resiliency solutions by manipulating Circuit Breakers, Shapers, Load Balancers, and Failover configurations.
• Solid understanding of performance engineering best practices, key metrics, and statistical analysis.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities effectively while collaborating with distributed teams.

Preferred qualifications

• Direct experience working with real-time financial systems or electronic trading platforms is highly desired.
• Experience with cloud computing and container orchestration, particularly Google Cloud Platform (Google Cloud Platform), Kubernetes, and Docker.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted analysis, LLM tools, or intelligent automation workflows.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI tools within IDEs such as Visual Studio or IntelliJ.

Medical, dental, and vision insurance are available to qualified candidates who meet eligibility requirements.
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