Senior Performance Engineer: Java & High-Throughput Systems

Aquent; Southlake (TX); On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Aquent is partnering with a leading financial services firm to hire a Senior Performance Engineer. This role centers on optimizing a Java-based trading platform to improve latency, scalability, and resilience across the ecosystem.

You will independently plan initiatives and drive improvements that impact systems used by millions of users. In this individual-contributor position, you will dive into code and production metrics, build workloads and diagnostic tools, and influence architecture

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering.
• 5+ years in performance engineering, scalability, or production performance analysis.
• Hands-on Java development experience (≥2 years).
• Deep knowledge of JVM internals, memory management, and latency.
• Ability to analyze source code and diagnose bottlenecks with logs and profilers.
• Experience building workload generators and automation with Java, Scala, Python, or shell.
• Familiarity with Linux, databases, and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Independently plan and deliver performance, scalability, resiliency, and capacity validation.
• Analyze architecture, workloads, and production behavior to guide strategies.
• Develop robust performance tests, workload generators, and automation tools.
• Execute load, stress, endurance, and resilience tests across ecosystems.
• Analyze JVM behavior, resources, and end-to-end latency to identify issues.
• Provide evidence-based recommendations for code, config, and design improvements.
• Maintain dashboards, runbooks, and diagnostic tooling for performance.
• Communicate results and risks clearly to stakeholders.

Skills

Java development

Performance testing

JVM internals

Linux systems

Observability tools

Profiling & bottlenecks

Load balancing & resilience

Scripting (Shell)

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering

Tools

JMeter

Gatling

Splunk

Grafana

Job description

Aquent is partnering with a leading financial services firm to hire a Senior Performance Engineer. This role centers on optimizing a Java-based trading platform to improve latency, scalability, and resilience across the ecosystem.

You will independently plan initiatives and drive improvements that impact systems used by millions of users. In this individual-contributor position, you will dive into code and production metrics, build workloads and diagnostic tools, and influence architecture