Expert Performance Engineer

Description

We are looking for a highly skilled and experienced Expert Performance Engineer to strengthen our performance engineering efforts and ensure our systems are highly scalable, reliable, and efficient. This role offers a unique opportunity to focus on hands-on performance optimization, advanced profiling, diagnostics, and building performance-focused tooling that supports engineering teams across the organization.

As an Expert Performance Engineer, you will implement and evolve performance testing frameworks, analyze and resolve system bottlenecks, and work closely with development, DevOps, and architecture teams to optimize application and infrastructure performance. You will also contribute to building performance-as-a-service capabilities, enabling teams to independently execute and evaluate performance tests using scalable, self-service tools.

This role requires deep hands-on expertise, strong analytical skills, and a proactive approach to driving system performance improvements.

Requirements

What You'll Do:

• Architect, develop, and scale performance testing infrastructure for load, stress, endurance/longevity, and scalability testing.
• Contribute to performance as a service, building and maintaining self-service performance testing frameworks that allow development teams to execute and analyze tests autonomously.
• Establish and maintain performance KPIs, validating optimal system behavior under various workloads.
• Conduct in-depth performance analysis, identifying and resolving bottlenecks in APIs, databases, caching layers, and distributed systems.
• Integrate performance testing and monitoring into development workflows and CI/CD pipelines.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to promote performance-first design patterns and practices.
• Enhance observability and monitoring capabilities, implementing and fine-tuning APM tools like Prometheus and Grafana.
• Analyze customer incidents, proactively identifying trends and opportunities for performance improvement.
• Advocate for a shift-left approach, ensuring performance considerations are embedded early in the SDLC.

  Requirements:

• 9+ years of experience in performance engineering, testing, and optimization.
• Strong hands-on expertise with performance testing tools (e.g., JMeter, Locust, k6).
• Proven ability to independently conduct detailed performance analysis and profiling.
• Experience contributing to or building self-service performance testing platforms.
• Proficiency in Python, Shell Scripts, Groovy, or similar scripting languages for performance automation.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines and automation toolchains (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI).
• Deep knowledge of cloud-native architectures, including containerization (Docker, Kubernetes, serverless) and microservices.
• Experience working with any cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
• Experience with backend systems like Postgres, Kafka, or equivalent databases/messaging platforms.
• Expertise in profiling and monitoring tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace, Pyroscope).
• Ability to troubleshoot complex performance issues at the application, database, and infrastructure levels.
• Passion for continuous improvement, automation, and engineering excellence.

 Aqua Security is the pioneer in cloud native security. Founded in 2015, Aqua Security is a global late-stage scale-up and the largest pure play cloud native vendor. Aqua helps enterprises see and stop threats across every phase of the software development lifecycle, from dev to cloud and back.

Why we’re unique:

• Total of $265M in VC funding, with a valuation of $1B+ and TAM of $25-30B
• More than 500 enterprise customers around the globe, across 40 countries including 40% of the Fortune 100
• Strategic partnerships with the major cloud native platform providers and public cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM)
• The most loved cloud native open-source tools with the world’s largest open-source community tool for vulnerability scanning, Trivy
• The world’s leading dedicated cloud native threat research team, Aqua Nautilus.

 If you’re ready for an exciting opportunity to dive into the hottest cybersecurity category, now is the perfect time to join Aqua! We are a global organization where every Aquarian can make a difference and make a big impact. Aqua also offers great company culture, amazing colleagues, international travel, and lots more!

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or protected veteran status.