Senior Performance Engineer

The Senior Performance Engineer spearheads the strategy for application scalability, capacity planning, and resilience. They will lead end-to-end performance initiatives, working across functional boundaries to ensure our systems are robust, responsive, and reliable. From developing sophisticated simulation scripts to performing deep-dive root cause analysis on production-level bottlenecks, they will be the primary advocate for a seamless user experience.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Performance Strategy & Frameworks: Lead the authoring and iteration of automated performance scripts and CI/CD integrations. Will own the instrumentation and telemetry strategy to ensure high-fidelity data capture.

• Shift-Left Engineering: Partner with developers and analysts from day one of the SDLC. Ensure performance requirements aren’t an afterthought but are documented and baked into the initial architecture.

• Proactive Monitoring & SRE Alignment: Anticipate and mitigate issues before they impact the user. Will leverage APM tools and profilers to maintain a pulse on system health and drive the resolution of complex concurrency and scalability bottlenecks.

Key Activities

• SRE Collaboration: Partner with Technical Services to establish SLOs and Error Budgets, balancing the need for rapid feature velocity with rock-solid system reliability.

• Self-Service Enablement: Design and build continuous performance testing capabilities that allow developers to execute tests in a self-service capacity within their own pipelines.

• Workload Modeling: Construct sophisticated workload models and simulations that accurately mimic real-world traffic to establish scalability benchmarks.

• Architectural Scrutiny: Participate in design reviews to identify performance risks in system integrations, database schemas, and application logic.

• Mentorship & Code Review: Lead code reviews for performance scripts and artifacts, ensuring the team adheres to industry best practices and maintains high-quality test suites.

• Deep-Dive Analysis: Utilize advanced profiling tools (e.g., Oracle Flight Recorder, JProfiler) to identify memory leaks, thread contention, and I/O bottlenecks.

Education: Bachelor’s or Graduate degree in Computer Science, or a related technical field.

Experience: 6+ years of dedicated IT Performance Engineering/Testing experience.

Technical Stack:

Languages: Proficiency in Java, Python, or JavaScript.

Web Tech: Strong understanding of contemporary web architectures (Angular, CSS, XML, HTML5).

Data: Deep experience with relational databases (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL) and query optimization.

Infrastructure: Experience automating testbeds on-prem and in Cloud environments (AWS/Azure/GCP).

Orchestration: Familiarity with containerization (Docker/Kubernetes)

Performance Test Tools: Strong background in load testing tools to script complex workloads. Grafana K6 scripting and experience is highly preferred.

Soft Skills: Exceptional ability to communicate complex technical findings to non-technical stakeholders.

Full-Time Equivalent Hiring Range: $110,150 to $137,700; salary commensurate with relevant experience.

Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA)

Boston College Introduction

Founded in 1863, Boston College is a Jesuit, Catholic university located six miles from downtown Boston with an enrollment of 9,654 full-time undergraduates and 5,072 graduate and professional students. Ranked 37 among national universities, Boston College has 923 full-time and 1,336 FTE faculty, 2,822 non-faculty employees, an operating budget of $1.4 billion, and an endowment in excess of $3.9 billion.