Staff Software Engineer II - Performance Engineering Architect, JMeter, SQL, NoSQL & Java

What you’ll do:

• Lead performance architecture and test execution activities for existing and new products in the Cognitive Execution portfolio.
• Design, modify, and optimize performance tests using JMeter, Gatling or similar tools (Expert level), and establish reusable frameworks, workload models, and execution standards adopted across the team.
• Execute and oversee performance, load, and benchmark tests; own analysis, status reporting, and stakeholder communication during active release cycles.
• Publish comprehensive performance test reports and communicate findings to DevOps and development teams for triage and resolution.
• Lead blameless root cause investigations of performance issues, guide development teams to fix those rather than their symptoms; hold the team accountable to root-cause thinking as a practice. Turn them into concrete, prioritized improvements in product and performance test cases.
• Inspire fellow engineers to raise their technical craft: give practical, hands-on guidance on writing cleaner code, more effective tests, and simpler test architectures.
• Help other team members arrive at simpler, more robust, and more efficient designs through coaching rather than prescribing solutions.
• Support team management in prioritizing backlog items. Translate business requirements to user stories and actively seek feedback from stakeholders.
• Participate in team activities such as backlog grooming, planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives.
• Make impediments transparent, communicate them clearly with practical alternatives, and help others overcome theirs.
• Participate in and help shape team hiring: identify skill gaps and influence job requirements for future performance engineering needs.

What we are looking for:

• Bachelor's degree in STEM (or equivalent practical experience).
• 12-16+ years of relevant experience in software performance engineering with a proven track record of technical leadership, mentorship and cross-team influence.
• Expert-level performance engineering execution with a track record of setting strategy and standards, not just executing test plans.
• Demonstrated leadership in pushing teams towards better quality software and helping team members develop simpler, more robust test designs.
• JMeter, Gatling, Taurus, or similar load/performance testing tools: Expert.

• Design, modify, and maintain complex performance test scripts, frameworks, and reusable assets across products.
• Experience with BlazeMeter (or similar) as an execution/orchestration platform for test runs and result analysis.

• Java code comprehension for performance analysis: Advanced.

• able to read, reason about, and coach others on code-level root causes of performance issues.

• Appium/Selenium for UI performance testing.
• SQL and database performance tuning: Expert.

• Prevent slow queries and optimize SQL for faster execution.
• Identify bottlenecks, including locking/contention, and lead resolution efforts.
• Recommend and validate query improvements and indexing strategies.
• Strong fundamentals in query complexity analysis, transactions, locking behavior, and execution plan analysis.
• Diagnose root causes (not just symptoms) of query performance issues.

• SQL and NoSQL database concepts: Expert knowledge, with the ability to evaluate trade-offs between technologies and guide architecture decisions.
• JVM fundamentals: Advanced.

• Memory leaks: diagnose and resolve, and coach others through troubleshooting.
• Garbage collection (GC) impact on latency and throughput, and how to tune for it.
• Optimize JVM configurations for improved application performance across services.
• Conduct heap dump analysis and performance profiling and mentor others in the technique.

• Observability and monitoring tools: Advanced (hands-on).

• Practical, expert experience with Elastic/Splunk/Datadog (or equivalent).
• Ability to query application logs in Elastic/Kibana and write KQL (or equivalent queries).
• Extract and analyze information related to performance (memory, CPU, latency, throughput, etc.).
• Correlate application logs with performance metrics to independently identify and communicate root causes.

• Tools Familiarity: Linux, Jira, Git, GitHub, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, IntelliJ/Eclipse, SSMS.
• Azure (or equivalent cloud platform): Intermediate. Solid Kubernetes and Docker concepts, including operational/cost implications at scale.
• Nice to Have

• Warehouse Management Solutions (WMS) domain knowledge.
• Supply chain domain understanding.
• Contributions to open-source projects or technical communities.
• Conference presentations or published articles on performance engineering.

Our Values

If you want to know the heart of a company, take a look at their values. Ours unite us. They are what drive our success – and the success of our customers. Does your heart beat like ours? Find out here: Core Values

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status.