Performance Engineering Cloud Lead

Morgan Stanley; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Morgan Stanley is seeking an experienced Performance Engineering Cloud Lead to define and drive the strategy for GCP transformation. You will act as SME for cloud-native performance, guiding architecture decisions, and ensuring performance, resiliency, and observability across multi-region deployments.

This role partners with Architecture, Engineering, Infrastructure, and Platform teams to establish standards, conduct benchmarks, and certify target architectures.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in Performance Engineering for distributed systems and large-scale apps.
• Experience supporting cloud migrations or modernization efforts.
• Strong knowledge of autoscaling, caching, and multi-region deployments.
• Hands-on with cloud-native observability tools.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the Performance Engineering strategy for GCP.
• Lead performance assessments, benchmarks, and studies.
• Establish standards, guardrails, and non-functional requirements.
• Design performance validation frameworks (load, stress, endurance).
• Develop baselines and capacity models for multi-region architectures.
• Remediate performance bottlenecks across stack layers.
• Introduce modern testing, monitoring, and automation for continuous validation.
• Define governance for performance certification of workloads.
• Communicate risks and recommendations to senior stakeholders.

Skills

GCP experience

Cloud-native architecture

Kubernetes / GKE

Observability tooling

Performance modeling

Bottleneck analysis

Data-driven recommendations

Excellent communication

Tools

LoadRunner

JMeter

Grafana

Prometheus

Dynatrace

AppDynamics

Splunk

Job description

In the Technology division, we leverage innovation to build the connections and capabilities that power our Firm, enabling our clients and colleagues to redefine markets and shape the future of our communities. This is a Performance Engineering Cloud Lead position at the Director level which is part of the job family responsible for managing and optimizing technical infrastructure and ensuring the seamless operation of IT systems to support business needs effectively. The Performance, Performance Analytics & Management (PPAM) organization is responsible for ensuring that critical technology platforms meet performance, scalability, capacity, resiliency, and customer experience objectives. As the firm progresses its cloud transformation, PPAM is expanding its Performance Engineering capabilities to address the unique performance and resiliency considerations associated with cloud-native architectures and applications.

Morgan Stanley is an industry leader in financial services, known for mobilizing capital to help governments, corporations, institutions, and individuals around the world achieve their financial goals.

Interested in joining a team that’s eager to create, innovate and make an impact on the world? Read on.

We are seeking an experienced Performance Engineering Cloud Lead to establish and drive the Performance Engineering strategy for migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This individual will serve as a Performance Engineering subject matter expert for cloud-native technologies, providing technical leadership across performance, scalability, resiliency, observability, capacity planning, and performance certification.

The role will partner closely with Architecture, Engineering, Infrastructure, and Platform teams to evaluate cloud architectures, lead performance proof‑of‑concepts and benchmark studies, establish engineering standards and guardrails, and certify target architectures from a performance and resiliency perspective.

This is a highly technical role requiring the ability to influence architectural decisions through data‑driven analysis, engineering expertise, and measurable performance outcomes.

The objective of this position is to establish dedicated cloud‑native Performance Engineering expertise within PPAM as the adoption of GCP expands. The role will bridge the existing Performance Engineering capability with emerging cloud architectures by introducing the standards, tooling, automation, capacity models, performance guardrails, and certification methodologies needed to evaluate cloud workloads consistently.

The position will help ensure that cloud‑hosted applications meet required performance, scalability, resiliency, capacity, and customer‑experience objectives, while reducing technical risk associated with cloud migration and supporting the broader modernization program.

What You’ll Do In The Role

• Define and drive the Performance Engineering strategy for GCP transformation, embedding performance, scalability, resiliency, and capacity considerations into architecture decisions from inception.
• Partner with Architecture, Engineering, Infrastructure, and Platform teams to evaluate cloud‑native designs and deployment patterns, including microservices, Kubernetes/GKE, service mesh, caching, messaging, and data platforms.
• Lead performance assessments, proof‑of‑concepts, benchmarks, and comparative architecture studies, providing data‑driven recommendations across latency, throughput, scalability, resiliency, and cost‑performance tradeoffs.
• Establish cloud performance engineering standards, methodologies, guardrails, and non‑functional requirements covering capacity, resiliency, failover, autoscaling, and observability.
• Design performance validation frameworks covering load, stress, endurance, scalability, failover, chaos, and resiliency testing.
• Establish performance baselines and capacity models to support application growth and efficient operation across multi‑region and multi‑cell cloud architectures.
• Partner with development teams to identify and remediate performance bottlenecks across application, middleware, database, network, storage, container, and cloud infrastructure layers.
• Evaluate and introduce modern performance testing, monitoring, observability, and automation capabilities to enable continuous performance validation throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
• Define performance certification criteria and governance to validate cloud workloads against established service‑level objectives prior to production rollout.
• Leverage cloud‑native telemetry and observability data to develop actionable performance insights, dashboards, forecasting models, and capacity recommendations.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across the Performance Engineering organization, building broader expertise in cloud performance engineering and cloud‑native architecture.
• Communicate performance risks, architectural tradeoffs, certification results, and readiness assessments to senior technology stakeholders.

What You’ll Bring To The Role

• 10+ years of experience in Performance Engineering, with strong expertise supporting distributed systems and large‑scale customer‑facing applications.
• Hands‑on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and cloud‑native architecture.
• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes/GKE, cloud networking, cloud databases, containers, and observability platforms.
• Demonstrated experience defining performance strategies for cloud migration or large‑scale technology modernization initiatives.
• Deep understanding of scalability and resiliency patterns, including autoscaling, caching, asynchronous processing, event‑driven architectures, multi‑region deployments, and cell‑based architectures.
• Strong understanding of performance modeling, benchmarking, capacity planning, bottleneck analysis, and non‑functional testing.
• Hands‑on experience with performance and observability technologies such as LoadRunner, JMeter, Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Splunk, or equivalent platforms.
• Experience defining and executing load, stress, endurance, scalability, failover, and resiliency testing.
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills across multiple layers of the technology stack.
• Ability to influence senior Engineering and Architecture stakeholders through data‑driven technical recommendations.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to translate complex technical findings into clear architectural recommendations.

What You Can Expect From Morgan Stanley

At Morgan Stanley, we raise, manage and allocate capital for our clients – helping them reach their goals. We do it in a way that’s differentiated – and we’ve done that for 90 years. Our values - putting clients first, doing the right thing, leading with exceptional ideas, committing to diversity and inclusion, and giving back - aren’t just beliefs, they guide the decisions we make every day to do what's best for our clients, communities and more than 80,000 employees in 1,200 offices across 42 countries. At Morgan Stanley, you’ll find an opportunity to work alongside the best and the brightest, in an environment where you are supported and empowered. Our teams are relentless collaborators and creative thinkers, fueled by their diverse backgrounds and experiences. We are proud to support our employees and their families at every point along their work‑life journey, offering some of the most attractive and comprehensive employee benefits and perks in the industry. There’s also ample opportunity to move about the business for those who show passion and grit in their work.

To learn more about our offices across the globe, please copy and paste https://www.morganstanley.com/about-us/global-offices into your browser.

Expected base pay rates for the role will be between $120,000 and $170,000 per year at the commencement of employment. However, base pay if hired will be determined on an individualized basis and is only part of the total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may also include commission earnings, incentive compensation, discretionary bonuses, other short and long‑term incentive packages, and other Morgan Stanley sponsored benefit programs.

Morgan Stanley is an equal opportunity employer committed to building and maintaining a workforce that is diverse in experience and background. Our recruiting efforts reflect our strong commitment to a culture of inclusion, where individuals are hired, developed, and advanced based on their skills and talents.

Our workforce reflects a broad cross‑section of the global communities in which we operate, bringing a variety of backgrounds, talents, perspectives, and experiences.

For more information, please visit: https://www.morganstanley.com/people-opportunities/eeo.