Lead Java Developer - Performance Engineering

About the role

Smarsh helps regulated industries manage digital communication risks. This role focuses on optimizing the performance of Java-based services. You will lead efforts to ensure our cloud-based systems operate efficiently and reliably under various loads.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Regularly write, review, and debug Java code for production systems.
• Lead the architectural and development efforts for scalable Java services and APIs.
• Manage the entire performance engineering lifecycle, from setting benchmarks to validating them.
• Create and implement performance test suites (load, stress, soak, spike, scalability) within CI/CD.
• Analyze application performance to find bottlenecks in CPU, memory, GC, threading, I/O, Kafka, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Debezium, and network.
• Optimize JVM settings (garbage collection, heap size, thread pools) and application configurations.
• Interpret test results, generate performance reports, and convert findings into engineering tasks.
• Establish performance thresholds and automated checks to prevent regressions.
• Guide and mentor developers, focusing on performance in design and code reviews.
• Work with SRE/DevOps on capacity planning, monitoring, and production performance.
• Contribute to architectural decisions affecting scalability, reliability, and cost.

Requirements

• Over 8 years of software development, with strong, current Java (Java 11/17+) and JVM expertise.
• Proven experience designing and running large-scale distributed cloud systems on AWS.
• Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka for event streaming, partitioning, and tuning.
• Expertise in MongoDB data modeling, indexing, and query optimization.
• Experience with Elasticsearch indexing, query performance, and cluster tuning.
• Practical knowledge of Debezium for change data capture pipelines.
• Skill in building production-ready microservices and REST APIs using Spring Boot.
• Demonstrated experience in performance engineering, including designing and executing test programs.
• Hands-on experience with performance testing tools like JMeter, Gatling, k6, or LoadRunner.
• Strong profiling and diagnostic skills using tools such as JProfiler, YourKit, async-profiler, VisualVM, or Java Flight Recorder.
• Deep understanding of JVM internals, garbage collection tuning, memory management, and concurrency.
• Solid experience diagnosing performance issues across the full stack (application, event streaming, database, search, caching, messaging).
• Experience running services in containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with observability and APM tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace).
• Demonstrated technical leadership, including mentoring and driving quality standards.

Nice to have

• Experience with high-volume data pipelines and CDC-driven architectures.
• Experience with capacity planning and cost optimization on AWS.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and integrating performance gates.
• Deep experience tuning distributed data stores under heavy load.
• Contributions to open-source projects, technical writing, or conference speaking on performance or distributed systems.

Skills & tools

• Java (Java 11/17+)
• JVM
• AWS
• Apache Kafka
• MongoDB
• Elasticsearch
• Debezium
• Spring Boot
• JMeter
• Gatling
• k6
• LoadRunner
• JProfiler
• YourKit
• async-profiler
• VisualVM
• Java Flight Recorder
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Grafana
• Prometheus
• Datadog
• New Relic
• Dynatrace