Principal Performance Engineer

Nemetschek

7d • $129,400 - $161,800

About The Position

The Principal Performance Automation Engineer sets the technical direction for load and performance engineering across the product portfolio, ensuring systems are scalable, efficient, and stable at production scale. This role owns the performance testing strategy, architecture, and tooling platform end to end. This includes defining benchmarks and service level objectives, leading deep investigations into complex bottlenecks, and translating results into engineering priorities.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in performance/automation engineering, software development, or DevOps, including 5+ years focused on load and performance engineering for large-scale or distributed systems.
• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or related field.
• Deep hands-on experience with AWS services relevant to performance testing, scaling, and monitoring (e.g., EC2, CloudWatch, ELB, Auto Scaling, S3), including cost-aware test environment design.
• Expert understanding of distributed systems, application workflows, data stores, caching, queuing, and infrastructure components; able to model and predict system behavior under load and influence architectural decisions.
• Strong software engineering skills are required to build and maintain k6 test suites, custom-built performance scripts and load generators, data generation, and result-processing tooling (e.g., in JS, TS, Python, C#), with emphasis on maintainable, reusable, reviewable code.
• Expert-level proficiency with industry-standard tools such as k6 for load, stress, and scalability testing.
• Proven experience designing and owning performance test integration in pipelines using tools like GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI, including automated gating and trend tracking.
• Advanced skills with observability and profiling platforms such as Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace, and OpenSearch to correlate metrics, traces, and logs during investigations.
• Ability to translate load test results into capacity, scalability, and sizing recommendations for production systems.
• Expert at interpreting complex performance data and presenting findings through automated reports and dashboards using tools like Pandas, Grafana, and related visualization or data-processing frameworks.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, drive standards and best practices, and lead initiatives across teams without direct authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, strong investigative mindset, and ability to present technical findings and trade-offs to both engineering and executive audiences.
• Practical, day-to-day use of AI assistants (e.g., GitHub Copilot, LLM-based tools) for script development, refactoring, test data creation, log and metric analysis, and report drafting, with sound judgment about verifying results and handling data appropriately.

Nice To Haves

• Cloud platform certifications (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc.).
• Experience with profiling and APM tooling, chaos or resilience testing, database and query performance tuning, and performance engineering for large-scale SaaS or desktop applications.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the long-term performance testing strategy, reference architecture, and roadmap for the load and performance team, aligning coverage with business and product risk.
• Lead the technical direction of the team, set coding and testing standards, review designs and code, and mentor performance engineers to raise the bar across the discipline.
• Architect and evolve frameworks, harnesses, and environments that simulate realistic production load, including large-scale data generation, distributed execution, and multi-tenant scenarios.
• Lead root-cause investigations into complex bottlenecks, memory leaks, contention, and scalability limits, and drive optimizations to closure with development and DevOps teams.
• Establish performance benchmarks, service level objectives, and regression gates; embed automated performance validation into CI/CD pipelines so regressions are caught early and consistently.
• Partner with engineering, DevOps, product, and support leadership to define performance goals, present findings to senior stakeholders, and influence architecture, capacity planning, and release decisions.
• Evaluate, select, and own performance testing and observability tooling; build reusable platforms, dashboards, and automation that scale across teams.
• Produce authoritative performance test plans, models, and analyses, and deliver clear, data-driven reports and dashboards that support engineering and business decisions.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits package
• Fully vested 401K right from the day you start
• Generous PTO, including sick/mental health & volunteer days
• Free & unlimited access to BetterUp Care, a well-being platform
• Work-life balance fostered through a culture of diversity, inclusion, and appreciation of individual lifestyle needs
• Opportunity for continuous professional development
• Free & unlimited access to LinkedIn Learning
• Up to $5K annual education reimbursement (after 1 year tenure)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal