Role: Systems Performance Engineer / Performance Optimization Engineer / Performance Analyst
Location: O'Fallon, MO (Hybrid - 2 days a week onsite)
Job Type: W2 Contract
NOTE: This is not a Performance Testing Role
Experience level: Lead/Chief/Principal/Staff
Responsible for identifying and resolving end-to-end performance bottlenecks across distributed systems, Spring Boot services, middleware components, and hybrid cloud environments (private cloud + AWS).This role goes far beyond traditional testing by deeply analyzing container orchestration, networking paths, and system interactions under load. This position maps full system workflows, sets realistic latency budgets, and ensures each component meets its SLOs. Ideal candidates have extensive experience with high-scale, multi-region, and high-transaction platforms (e.g., financial systems, payment processing, or large enterprise SaaS) running in a Cloud environment.
Key Responsibilities:
Define service-level objectives (SLOs), performance budgets, and latency/throughput targets across services.
Architect and champion comprehensive distributed tracing strategies (Dynatrace, AWS X-Ray, etc.).
Analyze application, platform, and cloud behavior using deep-dive techniques such as heap dumps, thread dumps, flame graphs, logs, network traces, and storage I/O profiling.
Review service and system architectures for performance risks (e.g., synchronous hops, excessive dependencies, misconfigured connection pools, poor cache placement).
Conduct and lead root-cause analysis for performance incidents in production and pre-production environments.
Develop capacity models and performance baselines for services running across cloud environments.
Areas of Expertise:
Application Layer: Spring Boot internals, JVM tuning, thread/heap management, concurrency debugging, optimization
Container Runtime: PCF, Docker, container resource limits, CPU throttling, memory pressure
Orchestrators: PCF, Kubernetes, ECS (autoscaling, pod health, scheduling issues)
Networking: Service-to-service hops, TLS overhead, DNS, routing, load balancer configs (F5, Nginx, ALB/NLB), service mesh performance
Storage: Latency, IOPS constraints, distributed file system behavior
Caching & Middleware: Redis, Hazelcast, NATS, Kafka, RabbitMQ configuration and throughput tuning
Databases: Connection pool tuning, slow queries, indexing, replication lag
Cloud Layer: AWS compute/storage/network performance, regional latency, cross-cloud traffic patterns
Never miss an opportunity! Create an alert based on the job you applied for.
