Performance Engineer

Performance Engineer

📍 Location: Shelton, CT

🏢 Industry: Restaurants

💼 Work Setting: Hybrid

Are you passionate about ensuring digital platforms perform flawlessly at scale, driving reliability engineering practices, and leveraging automation and AI to build resilient, high-performing customer experiences.We are seeking a Senior Performance Engineer to lead enterprise-wide performance engineering initiatives across a global digital ecosystem. This highly visible role serves as a central performance engineering authority, partnering with engineering, architecture, site reliability, and operations teams to ensure applications and platforms are scalable, reliable, and optimized for peak performance. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with strong leadership skills and a passion for continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities

Performance Engineering Leadership

• Lead and own the enterprise performance engineering strategy, standards, governance, and operating model.
• Establish performance engineering best practices, engagement processes, and performance-readiness requirements across the software development lifecycle.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to product, platform, and engineering teams on performance, scalability, and reliability matters.
• Define performance objectives, success metrics, and operational standards for critical business applications.

Performance Testing & Validation

• Design, develop, execute, and analyze performance testing strategies including load, stress, endurance, scalability, and capacity testing.
• Establish workload models, performance baselines, thresholds, and key performance indicators aligned with business and operational goals.
• Validate application and infrastructure performance under varying traffic patterns and business scenarios.
• Produce comprehensive performance reports and recommendations for technical and business stakeholders.
• Support release readiness decisions through evidence-based performance assessments.

System Optimization & Troubleshooting

• Identify, analyze, and resolve performance bottlenecks across application, database, messaging, API, cloud, and infrastructure layers.
• Leverage observability and monitoring data to investigate system behavior and uncover optimization opportunities.
• Partner with development and architecture teams to implement performance improvements and scalability enhancements.
• Conduct root-cause analysis for performance incidents and recommend long-term corrective actions.

Reliability & Resilience Engineering

• Collaborate with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams to establish reliability-focused performance targets.
• Support resilience validation through fault injection, dependency testing, and controlled failure scenarios.
• Participate in reliability improvement initiatives that enhance system availability, recoverability, and operational readiness.
• Develop recommendations that strengthen monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and incident response practices.
• Contribute to operational risk reduction through proactive testing and validation.

Automation & CI/CD Integration

• Integrate automated performance validation into continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines.
• Develop testing frameworks, reusable scripts, and automated reporting solutions that increase efficiency and consistency.
• Establish performance quality gates and threshold-based validations within deployment processes.
• Reduce manual testing effort through automation and standardized engineering practices.

AI-Driven Engineering Innovation

• Leverage AI-assisted tools and workflows to accelerate test planning, test design, performance analysis, and issue triage.
• Define governance and quality controls for the use of AI-generated engineering outputs.
• Maintain performance artifacts, baselines, requirements, and documentation that support AI-enabled engineering workflows.
• Identify opportunities to improve engineering productivity through emerging technologies and intelligent automation.

Stakeholder Engagement & Communication

• Translate complex performance findings into business-focused insights and recommendations.
• Present performance risks, optimization opportunities, and readiness assessments to technical and executive stakeholders.
• Drive collaboration across engineering, architecture, operations, and business teams.
• Establish performance awareness and accountability across the organization.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5 years of experience in performance engineering, performance testing, non-functional testing, or related disciplines.
• Proven experience leading enterprise-scale performance initiatives for customer-facing digital platforms.
• Strong understanding of application architecture, scalability, reliability, and performance optimization principles.

Technical Skills

• Expertise with performance testing tools such as JMeter, k6, LoadRunner, NeoLoad, OctoPerf, or similar technologies.
• Experience designing and executing load, stress, endurance, scalability, and capacity tests.
• Strong understanding of observability, application monitoring, and performance diagnostics platforms.
• Experience integrating automated testing and validation into CI/CD pipelines.
• Proficiency in scripting and automation using Python, JavaScript, Java, or similar languages.
• Experience working in cloud environments such as AWS and/or Azure.
• Strong understanding of APIs, databases, distributed systems, and messaging architectures.
• Knowledge of performance tuning across applications, databases, infrastructure, and cloud services.
• Familiarity with modern monitoring, logging, and telemetry solutions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience within retail, e-commerce, consumer technology, hospitality, restaurant, or high-volume transaction environments.
• Understanding of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices and reliability-focused delivery models.
• Experience with chaos engineering, resiliency testing, and fault-injection methodologies.
• Familiarity with contract testing and consumer-driven testing approaches.
• Experience testing mobile, kiosk, point-of-sale, or embedded technology platforms.
• Exposure to AI-assisted engineering tools and intelligent automation solutions.