Performance Engineer [AQ-24103]

Aquent; Southlake (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Aquent is seeking a Senior Individual Contributor to optimize a Java-based high-performance fintech platform in Texas. You will drive latency reduction, scalability, and resiliency across complex systems to impact millions of users daily.

You will develop workloads, diagnostics, and automation, analyze JVM behavior, and guide architectural decisions. Collaboration with distributed teams and production dashboards will be key to maintaining performance and reliability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in performance engineering, scalability, or production performance analysis.
• 2+ years hands-on Java development.
• Deep Core Java knowledge: JVM internals, concurrency, memory, GC, latency.
• Ability to analyze source code and recommend improvements.
• Experience building workloads, baselines, KPIs, and SLOs/SLAs.

Responsibilities

• Plan and deliver performance, scalability, resiliency, and capacity validation.
• Understand architecture, workloads, dependencies, and production behavior to inform strategies.
• Collaborate with partner teams to define requirements and reports.
• Develop performance test scripts, workload generators, mock services, frameworks, and automation tools.
• Execute load, stress, endurance, scalability, failover, recovery, and resiliency tests.
• Analyze source code, JVM behavior, systems resources, logs, and latency to pinpoint issues.
• Recommend code, configuration, infrastructure, and design improvements (e.g., CircuitBreakers, LoadBalancers).
• Maintain dashboards, reports, diagnostic tools, and runbooks.
• Evaluate new testing/observability tools and integrate them.

Skills

Java

Performance engineering

Linux

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or engineering

Tools

JMeter

Gatling

Splunk

Grafana

Docker

Kubernetes

Python

Shell

Job description

Step into a pivotal role where your expertise will directly shape the future of high-performance financial technology, impacting millions of users daily. As a key individual contributor, you will be at the forefront of optimizing complex systems, ensuring unparalleled speed, reliability, and resilience, and leaving a lasting mark on critical platforms.

About The Hiring Company

Aquent is proud to partner with a leading firm in the financial services sector, a recognized innovator celebrated for its advanced technology and unwavering commitment to client success. This organization is a powerhouse dedicated to providing cutting-edge solutions that empower its users and drive the future of finance. You will be part of a forward-thinking environment where technological excellence is paramount, and your contributions will directly impact the millions who rely on these robust platforms.

About The Opportunity

Are you a passionate and experienced engineer with a profound understanding of Java, driven to optimize complex systems to their peak potential? We are seeking a senior individual contributor to join a dynamic team dedicated to elevating the performance and resilience of a cutting-edge, Java-based platform. In this pivotal role, you will independently plan and execute initiatives that directly enhance latency, scalability, reliability, and resiliency across the entire technological ecosystem. Your work will be absolutely critical in identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks, ensuring that these vital platforms operate with unparalleled efficiency and stability. This is your chance to make a profound impact, shaping the future of high-performance financial technology.

You will be instrumental in developing innovative workloads and diagnostic tools, diving deep into code and system behavior to uncover performance inhibitors. Your expert recommendations will span client, server, gateway, infrastructure, and cloud environments, directly influencing architectural decisions and overall system design. This is more than just a job; it’s an opportunity to leave a lasting mark on critical systems that power millions of users every day.

Key Responsibilities

• Independently plan and deliver performance, scalability, resiliency, and capacity validation for assigned systems.
• Deeply understand system architecture, business flows, dependencies, workloads, and production behavior to inform performance strategies.
• Collaborate with partner teams to define clear requirements, workloads, acceptance criteria, and comprehensive reports.
• Develop robust performance test scripts, workload generators, mock services, frameworks, and automation tools.
• Execute a wide range of tests including load, stress, endurance, scalability, failover, recovery, degradation, and resiliency tests.
• Conduct in-depth analysis of source code, JVM behavior, system resources, databases, networks, logs, metrics, and end-to-end latency to pinpoint issues.
• Formulate and validate recommendations for code, configuration, infrastructure, database, capacity, design, and resiliency improvements (e.g., CircuitBreakers, Shapers, LoadBalancers & Failover).
• Leverage production behavior as the baseline for workload design, capacity planning, risk analysis, and validation.
• Maintain essential dashboards, reports, diagnostic tools, runbooks, frameworks, and workload libraries.
• Evaluate and integrate new testing, profiling, observability, and resiliency tools to enhance capabilities.
• Utilize approved automation and AI tools to improve scripting, analysis, documentation, and diagnostics processes.
• Clearly communicate results, identified risks, actionable recommendations, and open issues to stakeholders.

Must-Have Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering.
• 5+ years of experience in performance engineering, scalability, software engineering, or production performance analysis.
• Strong hands-on experience with 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.
• Ability to analyze source code and recommend code-level improvements.
• Proficiency in reading source code and diagnosing bottlenecks using dumps, logs, profilers, metrics, and observability tools.
• Experience building workload generators, utilities, mock services, or automation with Java, Scala, Python, shell, JMeter, Gatling, or similar tools.
• Strong knowledge of Linux, databases, application servers, caching, connection pools, distributed systems, and networks.
• Ability to create workloads, baselines, thresholds, capacity measures, acceptance criteria, SLOs, SLAs, and KPIs.
• Demonstrated ability to provide evidence-based code, configuration, capacity, reliability, and design recommendations.
• Good experience in using Splunk, Grafana (or other monitoring tools).
• Experience in testing resiliency solutions by updating CircuitBreakers, Shapers, LoadBalancers & Failover configurations.
• Experience with troubleshooting and diagnosing JVM issues (e.g., thread dumps, garbage collection, and memory management).
• Understanding of performance best practices, key performance metrics, and statistics.
• Ability to manage priorities effectively and collaborate with distributed teams.

Preferred Qualifications That Set You Apart

• Experience with real-time financial systems.
• Familiarity with Google Cloud, Kubernetes, or Docker.
• Experience with AI-assisted analysis, LLM tools, or intelligent automation.
• Usage experience of AI tools with Visual Studio or IntelliJ IDEA.