Senior Application Performance Engineer (Developer) (Remote)

Job Title: Senior Application Performance Engineer (Developer)

Location: Dallas, TX(Remote)
W2 Position

Duration: Long Term

Experience: 10 12 years

We are seeking a senior developer with a strong performance engineering and testing background to lead end-to-end performance investigations, deliver clear root cause analyses and partner with application teams to remediate issues quickly. You will combine code-level profiling with systems and database analysis, design and execute performance tests and establish performance guardrails that prevent regressions.

Key responsibilities:

Lead performance issue investigations from signal to solution, including triage, replication, measurement and RCA.
Profile applications at the code level (CPU, memory, threads, I/O, network) and identify bottlenecks, anti-patterns and inefficiencies.
Analyze database performance (SQL and NoSQL): query plans, indexing, connection pooling, ORM behavior and caching strategies.
Design realistic performance test plans and scenarios (load, stress, spike, soak/endurance, scalability), including workload modeling and capacity baselining.
Build and maintain performance test scripts and harnesses; automate in CI/CD to enable shift-left performance checks.
Instrument applications for observability (metrics, logs, traces), define SLIs/SLOs, and create performance dashboards and alerts.
Conduct distributed tracing across microservices to isolate high-latency paths and dependency issues.
Tune runtimes and infrastructure: JVM/CLR settings, thread pools, HTTP connection pools, Kubernetes resource requests/limits, autoscaling policies.
Provide clear, actionable RCA reports with prioritized recommendations (code, configuration, database, infrastructure) and estimated impact.
Partner with developers to implement fixes; participate in targeted code reviews and pair programming for performance hot spots.
Contribute to capacity planning and cost/performance optimization for cloud environments.
Required qualifications and skills:

10 12 years in software development and performance engineering/performance testing.
Strong coding proficiency in one or more: Java, .NET/C#, Node.js, or Python; ability to read, profile, and optimize production-grade code.
Deep understanding of concurrency, multithreading/async I/O, data structures and algorithms, memory management, and network fundamentals (TCP, TLS, HTTP/1.1 3).
Hands-on performance profiling tools: VisualVM, dotTrace, Node Clinic, Linux perf, flame graphs, heap/Thread dump analysis.
APM tools: Datadog, Azure AppInsights and Grafana.
Performance testing tools: JMeter, Locust or Load Runner; ability to build maintainable test suites and realistic workloads.
Database performance expertise: PostgreSQL/MySQL/Oracle query tuning, explain plans, indexing, locking, ORMs (e.g., Hibernate), and caching layers (Redis/Memcached).
Experience with microservices, containers, and cloud: Docker/Kubernetes, AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform, autoscaling, HPA, resource quotas, service meshes.
Familiarity with messaging and streaming systems (Kafka/RabbitMQ) and their performance characteristics.
Strong RCA and technical writing skills; ability to communicate complex findings to both engineers and stakeholders with clear remediation steps and timelines.
Experience integrating performance checks into CI/CD pipelines and setting performance budgets/thresholds.
Nice to have:

Front-end/web performance optimization (Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse, bundling strategies, caching/CDN).
Chaos/resilience testing and fault-injection experience.
Security-performance tradeoffs (TLS termination, encryption overhead) and compliance-aware optimization.
Certifications: AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform, Dynatrace/AppDynamics/New Relic, ISTQB Performance Testing, SRE-related credentials.
Education:

Bachelor s degree in computer science, Engineering, or equivalent experience. Advanced degree is a plus.