Performance Engineer - Expert

Location: Austin, TX Salary: $75.00 USD Hourly - $80.00 USD Hourly Description:
Job Title: Performance Engineer
Location: Fully Remote only within the Austin area
Position Type: 12+ Month Contract
About the Role
Join an enterprise digital platform engineering organization as a Performance Engineer focused on maximizing system speed, scalability, resilience, and end-user experience across mission-critical web applications and distributed architectures. In this role, you will bridge the gap between performance engineering, frontend optimization, deep observability, and release automation to uncover latency drivers and drive continuous performance improvements from early development to high-scale production.
Responsibilities

• Workload Modeling & Performance Testing: Plan, architect, and execute comprehensive performance testing strategies (baseline, load, stress, endurance, and capacity) for high-traffic web applications, APIs, and business-critical user flows using tools such as Apache JMeter and Micro Focus LoadRunner.
• Bottleneck Analysis & Diagnostics: Deep-dive into test results, distributed traces, system logs, and network waterfall diagrams to pinpoint latency and resource constraints across frontend, backend, microservice, database, and infrastructure layers.
• Frontend Performance & Core Web Vitals: Conduct advanced client-side performance audits utilizing Lighthouse, WebPageTest, Chrome DevTools, and Real User Monitoring (RUM) platforms; evaluate and optimize critical metrics including LCP, INP, CLS, FCP, and TTFB.
• Observability & Synthetic Monitoring: Configure, maintain, and enhance operational performance dashboards, SLIs/SLOs, and proactive alerting; deploy synthetic tests and RUM telemetry for high-value user journeys across digital properties.
• CDN & Edge Optimization: Analyze and fine-tune Content Delivery Network (CDN) behavior (such as Akamai), edge routing, cache-control headers, compression algorithms, cache keys, invalidation policies, and cache state behaviors (HIT, MISS, STALE, and bypass) across both public and authenticated sessions.
• Automation & CI/CD Shift-Left: Develop automated scripts and utilities (in JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or Python) to integrate repeatable performance gates, regression detection, and performance budgets into modern CI/CD deployment pipelines.
• Collaborative Architecture Reviews: Partner directly with UI/UX designers, application developers, API architects, and platform/DevOps engineers to review architectural designs, remediate bottlenecks, and embed performance engineering standards across agile delivery teams.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of dedicated experience in performance engineering, load/stress testing, or software systems engineering.
• Proven expertise designing, running, and analyzing enterprise performance tests using JMeter, LoadRunner, or equivalent testing frameworks.
• Strong background in frontend performance diagnostics, network waterfall inspection, and browser profiling via Chrome DevTools.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience building telemetry dashboards, performance monitoring systems, and alerting thresholds.
• Solid understanding of web architectures, HTTP/HTTPS protocols, RESTful APIs, browser rendering mechanics, and distributed systems.
• Experience with CDN caching mechanisms, cache invalidation, edge delivery behavior, and HTTP cache headers.
• Working ability to write scripts and test automation utilities using JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, or Java.

Preferred Qualifications

• Practical knowledge of enterprise CDN platforms and edge analytics (e.g., Akamai rules, caching strategies, and edge configurations).
• Experience utilizing enterprise observability and APM suites such as Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, or Grafana.
• Experience implementing automated audit tools and client-side tooling such as Lighthouse CI, SpeedCurve, WebPageTest, or mPulse.
• Familiarity with modern frontend architectures (React, Next.js, SSR, and edge rendering) and headless CMS integrations.
• Hands-on exposure to containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes) and public cloud environments.
• Familiarity with web accessibility criteria (WCAG 2.2 AA) and their operational intersection with frontend rendering performance.

Medical, dental, and vision insurance are available to qualified candidates who meet eligibility requirements.
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