Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering

What you'll do

• Troubleshoot complex performance issues across browsers, back ends, and operating systems; establish troubleshooting standards and performance sign-offs.
• Define performance objectives and drive capacity modeling, tuning, automated test suites, CI/CD gates, and observability dashboards.
• Lead adoption and governance of AI-enabled engineering workflows, including validation, security, and reuse standards.

What they ask for

• Typically 12+ years of performance engineering experience for high-traffic distributed systems, with a broader software engineering foundation.
• Hands-on expertise debugging distributed systems to the system-call boundary, including strong JVM internals knowledge.
• Fluency in Java and Node.js/React; hands-on Java/Spring Boot and Kubernetes experience, including self-managed Kubernetes and EKS.
• Demonstrated leadership in performance engineering and adoption of agentic AI-enabled development practices, including responsible AI controls.

Nice to have

• Financial-services-scale, low-latency, or regulated-environment experience; data-platform performance optimization.
• Experience with service virtualization or fault injection; familiarity with k6, service mesh technologies, or advanced performance tooling.

Pay

USD 204,250.00-$285,000.00 base salary (Palo Alto, CA); USD 204,250.00-$285,000.00 base salary (New York, NY); USD 175,750.00-$260,000.00 base salary (Chicago, IL); USD 204,250.00-$285,000.00 base salary (Jersey City, NJ)

Tools

Java, Node.js, React, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, EKS, JMeter, BlazeMeter

AI focus

Architect and govern agentic AI-enabled engineering workflows, such as PR review assistance, test generation, release readiness, incident triage, and root-cause acceleration; establish human-in-the-loop validation, auditability, security, and responsible-use controls.