Senior Java Performance Engineer

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

Job summary

Aquent invites an experienced performance engineer to join a premier financial services technology partner in Texas. You will independently plan and execute initiatives to optimize latency, scalability, and resiliency of a Java-based platform, shaping how millions of users experience high-speed finance.

In this senior individual contributor role, you will analyze JVM behavior, implement load testing strategies, and collaborate with distributed teams to drive measurable improvements in production

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 industry-standard monitoring tools.
• Experience in testing resiliency solutions by updating CircuitBreakers, Shapers, LoadBalancers, and 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.

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, and 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.

Skills

Performance engineering

Java development

JVM tuning

Linux systems

Observability

Metrics & monitoring

Capacity planning

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering

Tools

JMeter

Gatling

Shell

Python

Java

Scala

Grafana

Splunk

Kubernetes

Docker

Job description

Aquent invites an experienced performance engineer to join a premier financial services technology partner in Texas. You will independently plan and execute initiatives to optimize latency, scalability, and resiliency of a Java-based platform, shaping how millions of users experience high-speed finance.

In this senior individual contributor role, you will analyze JVM behavior, implement load testing strategies, and collaborate with distributed teams to drive measurable improvements in production