Performance engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

Maximus is currently seeking a Senior Performance Engineer. The Senior Performance Engineer leads performance engineering activities across large-scale healthcare technology programs.
This role defines performance test strategies, develops and maintains performance testing frameworks, creates realistic workload models, and evaluates application scalability, reliability, stability, and capacity.
The engineer partners with Development, Architecture, DevOps, Cloud Engineering, Database Administration, Product, and Business teams to identify bottlenecks, determine root causes, recommend corrective actions, and validate improvements.
The role also establishes performance engineering standards, integrates performance validation into CI/CD pipelines, mentor other engineers, and communicates technical and business risks to stakeholders. This is a remote position. Essential Duties and Responsibilities: - Lead the development of software solutions that will meet or exceed business requirements which includes; designing and implementing modules to the system specifications, conducting unit testing, troubleshooting issues, and producing detailed proposals to resolve issues. - Evaluate new coding techniques, tools, modules, and implement as appropriate. - Consult on requirements elicitation and definition. - Design software solutions per systems requirements. - Code software solutions per designs. - Code reviews, unit test, and integrate coded modules. - Assist other developers in resolving issues by providing guidance and training. - Support testing and remediate defects. - Support users through troubleshooting and analysis of production logs and data. - Investigate new solutions, tools, products, and techniques to incorporate into coding standards. - May provide guidance, coaching, and training to other employees within job area. Job-Specific Essential Duties and Responsibilities: - Lead performance testing activities including planning, workload modeling, test design, scripting, execution, analysis, reporting, and stakeholder communication. - Partner with business and technical stakeholders to establish, refine, and validate non-functional requirements (NFRs) and performance service level objectives, ensuring response time, throughput, concurrency, scalability, availability, resilience, and capacity targets align with business and operational needs. - Design and execute load, stress, spike, endurance, scalability, and capacity testing scenarios. - Develop realistic workload models based on business transactions, production usage patterns, and projected growth. - Plan performance test environments, monitoring and observability requirements, test data strategies, and distributed load generation approaches. - Analyze performance metrics, logs, traces, and monitoring data across applications, databases, infrastructure, JVMs, containers, and cloud platforms to identify bottlenecks and root causes. - Provide actionable recommendations to improve system performance, scalability, reliability, and resource utilization. - Establish performance baselines and identify performance regressions across releases. - Design, develop, and maintain performance testing frameworks, automation utilities, CI/CD integrations, and cloud-native testing capabilities supporting AWS services, Kubernetes clusters, Docker containers, Helm deployments, and microservices architectures. - Participate in architecture and design reviews to identify performance, scalability, and NFR testability risks early in the development lifecycle. - Mentor engineers on performance engineering methodologies, tools, and best practices. - Evaluate and recommend emerging performance engineering, observability, and AI-enabled testing solutions. - Present performance findings, risks, and remediation recommendations to technical and business stakeholders. - Bring working knowledge of AI-enabled testing tools available in the marketplace and identify opportunities to apply them to enhance performance test script creation, maintenance, analysis, and optimization. - Stay current on emerging AI integrations, plugins, and community-driven innovations within the JMeter and broader performance engineering ecosystem,and assess their potential to strengthen existing capabilities. - Bachelor's degree in relevant field of study and 5+ years of relevant professional experience required, or equivalent combination of education and experience. Job-Specific Minimum Requirements: - Additional years of relevant experience will be considered in lieu of degree. - 5+ years of experience in performance testing and engineering for large-scale web, mobile, and digital applications, APIs, and microservices, including 2+ years in a technical lead role. - Strong experience performance testing enterprise applications across diverse API styles (REST, GraphQL, SOAP), protocols (HTTP/S, WebSockets), and architectural patterns (monolithic, microservices, serverless). - Proficiency deploying, executing, and managing JMeter (or comparable performance testing tools) in cloud-hosted containerized environments, such as Kubernetes on AWS. - Skilled in building workload models from production usage data, correlating results across application and infrastructure tiers, and producing performance reports that quantify risk and support release decisions. - Experience designing, generating, and managing large-scale test data sets to support realistic performance, scalability, capacity, and endurance testing scenarios. - Strong knowledge of Java, JVM tuning, thread analysis, memory management, and performance optimization techniques. - Experience integrating performance tests into CI/CD pipelines and supporting shift-left performance engineering practices. - Working knowledge of relational, NoSQL, and time-series databases, including schema design considerations and database performance tuning. - Experience leveraging monitoring and observability tools (Splunk, Amazon CloudWatch, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, or similar) to correlate application, infrastructure, and cloud telemetry, identify bottlenecks, and support root-cause analysis. - Understanding of distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes/container platforms, and modern web application infrastructure. - Experience conducting performance, load, stress, scalability, endurance, and capacity testing. - Experience working in Agile environments and collaborating with Development, DevOps, Architecture, Product, and Infrastructure teams. Personal/Soft Skills: Excellent verbal, written, presentation, and stakeholder communication skills. Ability to clearly communicate technical performance findings to both technical and business audiences. Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a data-driven approach to decision making. Proven ability to influence cross-functional teams and drive performance improvements. Ability to work independently with minimal supervision while managing multiple priorities. Strong leadership, mentoring, and knowledge-sharing capabilities. Excellent organizational and documentation skills. Ability to thrive in fast-paced Agile environments with competing priorities. Preferred Skills and Qualifications: - Experience supporting healthcare, government, or regulated technology programs. - Experience with AI-assisted test generation, analysis, and performance optimization tools. - Experience contributing to architecture reviews and cloud modernization initiatives. #techjobs #veteranspage #LI-Remote #HotJobs0929LI #HotJobs0929FB #HotJobs0929X #HotJobs0929TH #TrendingJobs #HotJobs0929Email Maximus is an equal opportunity employer.
We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, genetic information and other legally protected characteristics. Maximus compensation is based on various factors including but not limited to job location, a candidate's education, training, experience, expected quality and quantity of work, required travel (if any), external market and internal value analysis including seniority and merit systems, as well as internal pay alignment.
Annual salary is just one component of Maximus's total compensation package.
Other rewards may include short- and long-term incentives as well as program-specific awards.
Additionally, Maximus provides a variety of benefits to employees, including health insurance coverage, life and disability insurance, a retirement savings plan, paid holidays and paid time off.
Compensation ranges may differ based on contract value but will be commensurate with job duties and relevant work experience.
An applicant's salary history will not be used in determining compensation.
Maximus will comply with regulatory minimum wage rates and exempt salary thresholds in all instances.