Lead Performance Engineer

Wells Fargo•Charlotte, NC

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

Wells Fargo is seeking a Lead Performance Engineer to drive performance testing and optimization efforts for critical Contact Center IVR and API platforms. In this role, you will lead the design, development, and execution of comprehensive performance test plans, scenarios, and workloads to ensure scalability, stability, resiliency, and throughput across customer-facing and backend systems. You will partner closely with engineering, architecture, platform, and DevOps teams to identify performance bottlenecks, establish performance benchmarks, and implement solutions that enhance the reliability and customer experience of our contact center technologies. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in performance engineering, API validation, observability, and performance analysis within complex distributed environments, along with a passion for driving performance excellence through automation, CI/CD integration, and shift-left testing practices.

Requirements

5+ years of Software Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education
5+ years of hands-on experience with performance testing tools
5+ years of experience testing RESTful and SOAP APIs and distributed systems
5+ years of experience monitoring and observability tools such as Splunk, SPLOC, Grafana, AppDynamics
5+ years of experience in JVM performance tuning, garbage collection, and memory management
5+ years of demonstrated experience with service virtualization
5+ years of scripting/programming experience (C, Java, Python, or similar) sufficient to customize and troubleshoot tests

Nice To Haves

Experience working in cloud-based, microservices architectures
Solid understanding of container platforms such as Kubernetes/OpenShift (OCP)
Hands-on experience with messaging systems (Kafka)
Experience with caching technologies such as Redis
Experience integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines
Strong understanding of API gateways, middleware, and end-to-end system flows
Experience with network-level concepts (latency, proxies, load balancing)
Familiarity with troubleshooting across layers (client, API, platform, infrastructure)
Experience in financial services or other regulated environments
Strong analytical and critical thinking skills
Ability to quickly isolate problems and drive toward resolution
Clear and concise communication of technical findings to stakeholders
Self-driven with minimal need for oversight
Ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, high-expectation environment
Strong sense of ownership and accountability

Responsibilities

Design, develop, and execute comprehensive performance, load, stress, and capacity test strategies to validate scalability, reliability, and throughput across distributed systems.
Build, maintain, and enhance automated performance test scripts and frameworks using tools such as LoadRunner and Postman to simulate real-world user traffic and complex workloads.
Analyze application performance across microservices-based architectures running in Kubernetes/OpenShift (OCP) environments.
Monitor system health and performance using observability tools including Splunk, SPLOC, Grafana, and AppDynamics to identify trends, constraints, and anomalies.
Conduct deep-dive root cause analysis across application, infrastructure, network, JVM, and database layers to identify bottlenecks and drive performance improvements.
Evaluate JVM performance metrics including garbage collection, CPU utilization, memory consumption, heap usage, and thread behavior to optimize application efficiency.
Design and implement service virtualization solutions, including stubs and mock services, to support testing in dependent, unavailable, or constrained environments.
Test and validate event-driven architectures leveraging Kafka, Redis, and other messaging and caching technologies to ensure performance and resilience.
Define, establish, and validate performance benchmarks, SLAs, response time thresholds, concurrency limits, and capacity planning targets.
Partner with engineering, architecture, platform, and DevOps teams to lead performance engineering initiatives, drive shift-left testing practices, and integrate performance validation into CI/CD pipelines.