Lead Performance Engineer

Job Description

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), owner of the New York Stock Exchange, is hiring a Lead Performance Engineer for its Clearing Performance Engineering team in Atlanta. You will own performance strategy for event-driven Java platforms that run critical clearinghouses, where end-of-day processing windows are measured in minutes. You will lead deep-dive investigations, build test harnesses, mentor peers, and serve as the go-to voice on performance trade-offs across application, JVM, OS, and hardware layers.

Responsibilities

• Lead performance investigations on CPU-bound, multi-threaded Java systems, from application code down to JVM, OS, and hardware.
• Model how systems scale with data volume and instrument counts, and produce capacity projections that guide architecture decisions.
• Identify time-critical paths in batch and event pipelines, and propose and validate fixes such as head-start or out-of-band processing.
• Build test harnesses and realistic workloads that catch version-to-version regressions.
• Tune thread pools, GC, and heap for high-throughput, latency-sensitive pipelines.
• Turn findings into clear, data-backed recommendations for architects, developers, and business stakeholders.

Knowledge and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years in performance engineering, performance testing, or Java development on high-volume, low-latency systems.
• Deep JVM expertise: heap and thread dump analysis, GC log interpretation, memory and CPU profiling.
• Java plus scripting (Python, Groovy, or shell) for automation and harness development.
• Hands-on experience with load generation (JMeter, Gatling, or custom harnesses).
• Experience with message-based architectures (Kafka, IBM MQ, or equivalent).
• Strong written and verbal communication.

Nice to have

• Experience building observability data pipelines (metrics collection, processing, and storage) is a strong advantage. Familiarity with Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, or Grafana is a plus.
• Practical use of AI tools (Claude, Copilot, Cursor) for performance work such as GC log analysis, query writing, or harness scaffolding.

#LI-JW1

----------

Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics.