Senior Performance Lead Engineer

About the Role

InvoiceCloud is seeking a Senior Performance Lead Engineer (P4) with deep expertise in Performance Testing, Performance Engineering, Observability, and Distributed Systems. This role is critical in strengthening the reliability, scalability, and performance of our cloud-native payment and billing platform.

You will lead performance initiatives across engineering teams, define strategy, architect test frameworks, drive tooling improvements, and collaborate with leaders to ensure our platform meets demanding customer and business expectations. This is a high-impact, hands-on technical leadership role with influence across multiple product areas.

Key Responsibilities

Performance Engineering & Testing

• Lead the design, implementation, and execution of performance, load, stress, resiliency, and scalability tests for complex distributed systems.
• Develop end-to-end performance test strategy, test beds, reusable frameworks, and automation strategies.
• Define performance test strategies, workload models, benchmarking approaches, and performance acceptance criteria.
• Develop advanced performance scripts and harnesses using industry-standard tools.

Troubleshooting & Optimization

• Conduct deep-dive analysis of performance test failures, bottlenecks, and system degradations across application, database, network, and infrastructure layers.
• Use APM tools (preferably New Relic) to isolate issues, tune application performance, and recommend corrective actions.
• Work with engineering teams to address systemic inefficiencies, scalability limits, memory leaks, threading issues, CPU spikes, and downstream constraints.

Observability & Monitoring

• Improve system reliability by influencing and maturing monitoring, logging, alerting, and telemetry frameworks.
• Define and validate SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for critical services.
• Collaborate with SRE and platform teams to enhance observability capabilities across environments.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Act as a trusted performance expert for engineering, architecture, operations, and product teams.
• Serve as a technical lead for major performance engineering initiatives and strategic reliability programs.
• Partner with product and engineering leadership to shape reliability and performance roadmaps aligned to business goals.
• Mentor engineers on performance best practices, capacity planning, and system design for scale.

System Reliability & Scalability

• Lead initiatives to improve system uptime, throughput, latency, and resilience across microservices and Kubernetes clusters.
• Identify systemic issues across environments (production, pre-prod, integration) and drive preventive engineering solutions.
• Ensure performance considerations are baked into architecture reviews, design discussions, and release readiness processes.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in Performance Testing and Performance Engineering for distributed, cloud-native applications.
• Expert-level proficiency with performance testing tools (e.g., JMeter, LoadRunner, k6, or similar).
• Strong experience with Azure Cloud, .NET tech stack, Kubernetes, and distributed systems architectures.
• Extensive hands-on experience using APM tools, preferably New Relic.
• Strong SQL expertise, including performance tuning, indexing, query optimization; experience with sharded databases strongly preferred.
• Proven ability to define performance strategies, workload models, scalability plans, and architectural performance requirements.
• Hands-on experience troubleshooting performance issues across the full stack (application, database, network, containers).
• Strong understanding of observability pillars (metrics, logs, traces) and modern monitoring ecosystems.
• Experience developing performance automation frameworks and reusable test harnesses.
• Ability to lead technical discussions, influence architectural decisions, and collaborate with senior engineering leaders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in FinTech, billing, payments, or high-throughput transactional systems.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, feature flagging, and release engineering.
• Experience serving as a Tech Lead, leading cross-team performance initiatives or reliability programs.
• Knowledge of SRE principles, reliability best practices, and production readiness standards.