Senior Performance Engineer - JVM/Linux
First seen by Alion on Oct 23, 2026.
Job Description:
6+ years of overall IT experience, with significant experience in Performance Engineering - Application Performance Management.
Proven experience troubleshooting complex performance issues in enterprise applications.
Strong understanding of JVM internals, memory management, threading, GC, CPU and I/O behavior.
Strong Linux troubleshooting skills.
Ability to independently perform performance analysis and identify root causes rather than only execute predefined performance test scripts.
Experience working with development, DevOps, infrastructure, and database teams.
Responsibilities include:
- Lead end-to-end application performance engineering and troubleshooting activities.
- Analyze application and server performance issues across development, test, and production environments.
- Perform detailed Linux system-level performance analysis, including CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, processes, and system resource utilization.
- Analyze JVM heap dumps to identify memory leaks, excessive object creation, and memory-related bottlenecks.
- Analyze thread dumps to identify deadlocks, thread contention, blocked/waiting threads, thread pool issues, and CPU-consuming threads.
- Perform Garbage Collection (GC) analysis, including GC logs, pause times, heap utilization, allocation patterns, and JVM tuning opportunities.
- Conduct database performance analysis, including slow queries, execution plans, connection pools, locks, waits, indexing, and database resource utilization.
- Generate and analyze flame graphs for identifying CPU hotspots and application-level performance bottlenecks.
- Use application and server-side monitoring/observability tools to identify performance degradation and correlate application, infrastructure, and database metrics.
- Conduct root-cause analysis of performance incidents and provide actionable recommendations.
- Work with development teams to identify inefficient code paths, resource utilization issues, memory problems, and concurrency-related bottlenecks.
- Define performance baselines and monitor application performance against agreed SLAs/SLOs.
- Lead performance optimization initiatives and validate improvements through benchmarking and load testing.
- Prepare technical performance reports, bottleneck analysis, and optimization recommendations.
- Mentor junior performance engineers and provide technical leadership across performance engineering initiatives.
Primary Skills:
Candidates must have strong hands-on experience with:
- Linux - system-level troubleshooting and performance analysis
- Heap Dump Analysis
- Thread Dump Analysis
- Garbage Collection / GC Analysis
- Database Performance Analysis
- Flame Graphs
- Application-side Monitoring
- Server-side Monitoring
- JVM performance troubleshooting and tuning
- Application performance bottleneck identification
- Root-cause analysis and performance optimization
Secondary Skills:
- Java/JVM performance engineering
- JProfiler, VisualVM, Eclipse MAT, YourKit or similar profiling tools
- Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus or similar observability platforms
- Splunk or ELK for log analysis
- APM and distributed tracing
- Kubernetes/container performance monitoring
- SQL performance tuning
- Load/performance testing tools such as JMeter, LoadRunner, Gatling or similar
- CI/CD performance monitoring and engineering
- Cloud environments such as AWS, Azure or GCP
Skills
Linux, Java, Performance Tuning, Troubleshooting, DynaTrace, AppDynamics, NewRelic, Datadog, JVM, Unix, DevOps