Principal Software Engineer - Performance Engineering

JPMorgan Chase & Co. • Palo Alto, CA

1d • $175,750 - $285,000

About The Position

As a Principal Software Engineer in JPMorganChase’s Commercial and Investment Bank, within the Digital Channels & Connectivity organization and broader Payments Technology group, you will serve as the senior technical authority for performance engineering across platforms. This hands-on leadership role owns complex, cross-stack performance challenges, from browser and back-end systems through the operating system, and establishes how performance is engineered, measured, and sustained at scale. You will set technical direction and standards, mentor engineers, and build tools and practices that make performance a default part of engineering.

The role also shapes performance strategy and roadmaps and secures senior stakeholder support for their execution. It includes defining performance expectations and release sign-offs, developing scalable self-service testing capabilities, and embedding performance measurement and controls in delivery workflows. You will also govern the adoption of enterprise-authorized, AI-enabled engineering workflows, setting guardrails for validation, security, resiliency, auditability, and responsible use.

Requirements

• Typically 12 or more years of extensive performance engineering experience for high-traffic distributed systems, including web, APIs, microservices, event-driven, and data-centric systems, built on a strong broader software engineering foundation.
• Deep hands-on expertise debugging distributed-system performance problems, including investigation to the system-call boundary, and strong knowledge of JVM internals.
• Fluency in Java back-end and Node.js/React front-end ecosystems, including front-end and browser-stack performance debugging best practices.
• Hands-on software engineering experience with Java/Spring Boot and Kubernetes, including self-managed Kubernetes and EKS.
• Strong systems and cloud performance expertise, including Linux performance tooling, JVM tuning, containers, and OS-level troubleshooting under load.
• Deep expertise in workload modeling, queuing theory, and statistical analysis of latency and throughput; fluency with percentile-based SLOs and error budgets.
• Expertise with at least one industry-standard load and protocol testing tool, such as JMeter, BlazeMeter, or k6, and scripting and orchestration skills in Java, Python, or TypeScript for performance automation.
• Strong observability and APM capabilities using tools such as Dynatrace and/or OpenTelemetry, plus RUM and synthetic monitoring, with dashboarding in Kibana and/or Grafana.
• Ability to influence senior technical leaders, communicate complex performance trade-offs, set engineering standards, and develop scalable, self-service performance tooling and practices.
• Demonstrated experience designing and leading adoption of agentic AI-enabled development practices using enterprise-authorized tools, including standards for human-in-the-loop validation, auditability and traceability of changes, and secure handling of sensitive data.
• Strong understanding of responsible AI use and control expectations in engineering workflows, including security and resiliency implications, data sensitivity, and risk-based governance; ability to influence senior technical leaders on safe scaling patterns and reuse.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in financial-services-scale, low-latency systems, and/or regulated environments.
• Experience with data-platform performance optimization, such as Oracle tuning, JDBC pool tuning, Kafka throughput and partitioning, and caching strategies.
• Experience with service virtualization and fault-injection tools such as WireMock, Mountebank, or Toxiproxy, including record-replay and dynamic templating.
• Familiarity with modern cloud-native load-testing frameworks such as k6.
• Familiarity with service-mesh technologies such as Istio or Linkerd and traffic-control patterns such as rate limiting and backpressure.
• Knowledge of advanced performance tooling such as perf and eBPF, and production-grade troubleshooting practices.
• Practical application of LLMs for test generation, anomaly detection, or automated reporting in engineering workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own complex cross-stack performance problems, from the browser through the back end to the operating system, and establish troubleshooting standards and playbooks.
• Define and institutionalize non-functional requirements and service-level objectives, including percentile latency, throughput, ramp profiles, and error budgets; serve as the final technical authority for performance sign-offs across platform releases.
• Drive proactive performance engineering through early bottleneck detection, architectural guidance, capacity modeling, and runtime tuning.
• Build tooling and infrastructure that make performance testing a scalable, self-service capability across teams.
• Design and maintain automated load, stress, soak, spike, and capacity test suites with environment-aware, fully automated execution.
• Embed performance gates into CI/CD pipelines and build dashboards correlating test signals with production telemetry against defined SLOs.
• Architect and govern agentic AI-enabled engineering workflows using enterprise-authorized tools to improve delivery speed, code quality, and operational outcomes, while defining guardrails for validation, security, resiliency, and reuse.
• Apply knowledge of SDLC tools, including enterprise-authorized AI-assisted development and automation capabilities, to improve the value realized from automation at scale.
• Set engineering standards, mentor engineers, influence senior technical leaders, and shape performance strategy and roadmaps.

Benefits

• Competitive total rewards package, including base salary determined by role, experience, skill set, and location.
• Eligible roles may receive commission-based pay and/or discretionary incentive compensation in cash and/or forfeitable equity.
• Comprehensive health care coverage.
• On-site health and wellness centers.
• Retirement savings plan.
• Backup childcare.
• Tuition reimbursement.
• Mental health support.
• Financial coaching.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed