Lead Performance Engineer

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE); Atlanta (GA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) is hiring a Lead Performance Engineer for its Clearing Performance Engineering team in Atlanta. You will own performance strategy for event-driven Java platforms that run critical clearinghouses, where end-of-day processing windows are measured in minutes.

You will lead deep-dive investigations, build test harnesses, mentor peers, and serve as the go-to voice on performance trade-offs across application, JVM, OS, and hardware layers.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years in performance engineering, performance testing, or Java development on high-volume, low-latency systems.
• Deep JVM expertise: heap and thread dump analysis, GC log interpretation, memory and CPU profiling.
• Java plus scripting (Python, Groovy, or shell) for automation and harness development.
• Hands-on experience with load generation (JMeter, Gatling, or custom harnesses).
• Experience with message-based architectures (Kafka, IBM MQ, or equivalent).
• Strong written and verbal communication.

Responsibilities

• Lead performance investigations on CPU-bound, multi-threaded Java systems, from application code down to JVM, OS, and hardware.
• Model how systems scale with data volume and instrument counts, and produce capacity projections that guide architecture decisions.
• Identify time-critical paths in batch and event pipelines, and propose and validate fixes such as head-start or out-of-band processing.
• Build test harnesses and realistic workloads that catch version-to-version regressions.
• Tune thread pools, GC, and heap for high-throughput, latency-sensitive pipelines.
• Turn findings into clear, data-backed recommendations for architects, developers, and business stakeholders.

Skills

Performance engineering

Java development

JVM profiling

GC tuning

Python scripting

Load testing

Kafka

IBM MQ

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

JMeter

Gatling

Custom test harnesses

Job description

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), owner of the New York Stock Exchange, is hiring a Lead Performance Engineer for its Clearing Performance Engineering team in Atlanta. You will own performance strategy for event-driven Java platforms that run critical clearinghouses, where end-of-day processing windows are measured in minutes. You will lead deep-dive investigations, build test harnesses, mentor peers, and serve as the go-to voice on performance trade-offs across application, JVM, OS, and hardware layers.

Responsibilities

• Lead performance investigations on CPU-bound, multi-threaded Java systems, from application code down to JVM, OS, and hardware.
• Model how systems scale with data volume and instrument counts, and produce capacity projections that guide architecture decisions.
• Identify time-critical paths in batch and event pipelines, and propose and validate fixes such as head-start or out-of-band processing.
• Build test harnesses and realistic workloads that catch version-to-version regressions.
• Tune thread pools, GC, and heap for high-throughput, latency-sensitive pipelines.
• Turn findings into clear, data-backed recommendations for architects, developers, and business stakeholders.

Knowledge and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years in performance engineering, performance testing, or Java development on high-volume, low-latency systems.
• Deep JVM expertise: heap and thread dump analysis, GC log interpretation, memory and CPU profiling.
• Java plus scripting (Python, Groovy, or shell) for automation and harness development.
• Hands-on experience with load generation (JMeter, Gatling, or custom harnesses).
• Experience with message-based architectures (Kafka, IBM MQ, or equivalent).
• Strong written and verbal communication.

Nice to have

• Experience building observability data pipelines (metrics collection, processing, and storage) is a strong advantage. Familiarity with Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, or Grafana is a plus.
• Practical use of AI tools (Claude, Copilot, Cursor) for performance work such as GC log analysis, query writing, or harness scaffolding.

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Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics.