Principal Software Engineer – Performance Engineering

JPMorgan Chase JPMorgan Chase · Banking · Jersey City, NJ +1 · Commercial & Investment Bank

Principal Software Engineer focused on performance engineering for distributed systems in a financial institution. Responsibilities include defining NFRs/SLOs, scaling automated performance testing, driving resiliency, and applying AI/LLMs to enhance testing and reporting processes.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define and institutionalize application- and endpoint-level NFRs and SLOs, including p95/p99 latency, throughput, ramp profiles, and error budgets
  2. Drive proactive performance engineering through early bottleneck detection, architectural guidance, and capacity modeling
  3. Serve as the final technical authority for performance sign-offs across platform releases
  4. Design, build, and maintain automated test suites for load, stress, soak, spike, and capacity scenarios
  5. Apply AI/LLMs to workload and scenario generation, metrics interpretation, and automated reporting with measurable success guardrails

Skills

Required

  • 15+ years of overall engineering experience, with 10+ years in performance engineering for high-traffic distributed systems (web, APIs, microservices, event-driven, data-centric)
  • Hands-on software engineering experience with Java/Spring Boot and Kubernetes (self-managed and EKS)
  • Deep expertise in workload modeling, queuing theory, and statistical analysis of latency/throughput; fluent with percentile-based SLOs and error budgets
  • Proficiency with load and protocol testing tools such as JMeter and BlazeMeter
  • Scripting/orchestration skills in Java, Python, or TypeScript for performance automation and execution control
  • Experience with service virtualization and fault injection (e.g., WireMock, Mountebank, Toxiproxy), including record-replay and dynamic templating
  • Strong observability/APM capabilities using Dynatech and/or OpenTelemetry, plus RUM and synthetic monitoring approaches
  • Experience building dashboards and analysis workflows in Kibana and/or Grafana to drive actionable decisions
  • Strong CI/CD and DevOps experience (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab, GitHub Actions) including repeatable sign-offs, artifact/version alignment, and environment promotion
  • Infrastructure-as-code and platform delivery experience (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation) including autoscaling strategies
  • Ability to partner across architecture, SRE, and application teams to coach standards adoption and drive release readiness

Nice to have

  • Experience with data-platform performance optimization (e.g., Oracle tuning, JDBC pool tuning, Kafka throughput/partitioning, caching strategies)
  • Strong systems and cloud performance background (Linux tooling, JVM tuning, containers, AWS primitives such as compute, ALB/NLB, EKS, networking)
  • Experience with k6 and other modern cloud-native load testing frameworks
  • Familiarity with service mesh technologies (Istio/Linkerd) and traffic-control patterns (rate limiting, backpressure)
  • Practical application of LLMs for test generation, anomaly detection, or automated reporting in engineering workflows
  • Experience operating in financial-services scale, low-latency systems, and/or regulated environments
  • Knowledge of advanced performance tooling (e.g., perf, eBPF) and production-grade troubleshooting practices

What the JD emphasized

  • performance engineering for high-traffic distributed systems
  • AI/LLMs

Other signals

  • performance engineering
  • distributed systems
  • CI/CD
  • SLOs
  • AI/LLMs for workload generation