Lead Java Developer — Performance Engineering

Smarsh; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Smarsh is seeking a Lead Developer in Bengaluru to build and optimize high-throughput, low-latency Java services at scale. You’ll write production code, chase bottlenecks, and push the platform toward faster, more resilient releases on AWS with Kafka, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Debezium, and Spring Boot.

This is a technical leadership role, not a manager. You’ll mentor engineers, set performance standards, design tests, review code, and collaborate with SRE/DevOps on capacity, observability, and

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience in Java/JVM.
• Proven experience designing and operating cloud distributed systems at scale on AWS.
• Hands-on expertise with Kafka, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and Debezium.
• Experience in performance engineering and building testing programs.
• Ability to lead through code reviews, mentoring, and architecture decisions.

Responsibilities

• Remain hands-on: write, review, and debug production-quality Java code daily.
• Lead the design and development of scalable, high-performance Java services and APIs.
• Own end-to-end performance engineering strategy, including SLAs/SLOs and load testing.
• Design, build, and execute performance tests and integrate into CI/CD.
• Profile bottlenecks across CPU, memory, GC, threading, I/O, and data stores.
• Tune the JVM and app configuration for throughput and latency.
• Mentor engineers and drive performance-first design reviews.
• Collaborate with SRE/DevOps on capacity planning and observability.

Skills

Java/JVM mastery

Performance engineering

Leadership & mentoring

AWS cloud experience

Architectural design

Tools

Apache Kafka

MongoDB

Elasticsearch

Debezium

Spring Boot

Docker

Kubernetes

JProfiler

YourKit

async-profiler

VisualVM

Java Flight Recorder

Grafana

Prometheus

Datadog

New Relic

Dynatrace

JMeter

Gatling

k6

LoadRunner

Job description

Who are we?

Smarsh empowers its customers to manage risk and unleash intelligence in their digital communications. Our growing community of over 6500 organizations in regulated industries counts on Smarsh every day to help them spot compliance, legal or reputational risks in 80+ communication channels before those risks become regulatory fines or headlines. Relentless innovation has fueled our journey to consistent leadership recognition from analysts like Gartner and Forrester, and our sustained, aggressive growth has landed Smarsh in the annual Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing American companies since 2008.

About the Role

This is a Lead Developer role with a strong focus on performance engineering. You will spend your time building and optimizing high-throughput, low-latency systems at scale - writing production Java code, hunting down bottlenecks, and making the platform faster and more resilient.

Performance is the through-line of everything you do: you'll set performance requirements, design and execute the testing that validates them, profile and tune the system end-to-end, and build the engineering practices that keep it fast release over release. You'll work on services built on Kafka, MongoDB, Elasticsearch,Debezium, and Spring Boot running on AWS.

The "lead" in this role is technical, not managerial. You lead through hands-on work, strong engineering judgment, and by raising the performance bar for the people around you - through design and code reviews, mentoring, and setting standards - while remaining a core contributor in the codebase.

What You'll Do

• Remain hands-on: write, review, and debug production-quality Java code as a core, day-to-day part of the role.
• Lead the design and development of scalable, high-performance Java services and APIs.
• Own the end-to-end performance engineering strategy - from setting performance requirements and SLAs/SLOs to validating them under load.
• Design, build, and execute performance test suites (load, stress, soak, spike, and scalability tests) and integrate them into CI/CD pipelines.
• Profile applications to identify bottlenecks across CPU, memory, GC, threading, I/O, event streaming (Kafka), data stores (MongoDB, Elasticsearch), CDC (Debezium), and network layers, and drive them to resolution.
• Tune the JVM (garbage collection, heap sizing, thread pools) and application configuration for optimal throughput and latency.
• Analyzetest results, produce clear performance reports, and translate findings into concrete engineering actions.
• Establish performance benchmarks and guardrails, and prevent regressions through automated performance gates.
• Mentor and provide technical leadership to a team of developers; conduct design and code reviews with a performance-first lens.
• Collaborate with SRE/DevOps on capacity planning, observability, and production performance monitoring.
• Contribute to architectural decisions that affect scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.

What You Bring

• 8+ years of software development experience with strong, current, hands-on expertise in Java (Java 11/17+) and the JVM - you are still actively coding and comfortable in the codebase every day.
• Proven experience designing and operating modern cloud distributed systems at scale on AWS.
• Hands-on expertise across the following stack: Apache Kafka - event streaming, partitioning, consumer groups, and tuning for high-volume throughput.
• MongoDB - datamodeling, indexing, and query/performance tuning under load.
• Elasticsearch - indexing strategy, query performance, and cluster tuning.
• Debezium - change data capture (CDC) pipelines and connector configuration.
• Spring Boot - building resilient, production-grade microservices and REST APIs.
• Proven experience in performance engineering - designing and executing performance testing programs, not just running scripts.
• Hands-on experience with performance testing tools such as JMeter, Gatling, k6, or LoadRunner.
• Strong skills in profiling and diagnostics using tools such asJProfiler,YourKit, async-profiler,VisualVM, or Java Flight Recorder.
• Deep understanding of JVM internals, garbage collection tuning, memory management, and concurrency.
• Solid experience diagnosing performance issues across the full stack - application, event streaming, database, search, caching, and messaging.
• Experience running services in containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with observability and APM tooling (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace) for monitoring and root-cause analysis.
• Demonstrated technical leadership: mentoring engineers, leading design discussions, and driving quality standards.

Nice to Have

• Experience with high-volume data pipelines and CDC-driven architectures at scale.
• Experience with capacity planning and cost optimization on AWS.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and integrating performance gates into automated delivery.
• Deep experience tuning distributed data stores under heavy, sustained load.
• Contributions to open-source, technical writing, or conference speaking on performance or distributed-systems topics.

About our culture

Smarsh hires lifelong learners with a passion for innovating with purpose, humility and humor. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. We work closely with the most popular communications platforms and the world's leading cloud infrastructure platforms. We use the latest in AI/ML technology to help our customers break new ground at scale. We are a global organization that values diversity, and we believe that providing opportunities for everyone to be their authentic self is key to our success. Smarsh leadership, culture, and commitment to developing our people have all garnered Comparably.com Best Places to Work Awards. Come join us and find out what the best work of your career looks like.