Technical Lead, Application Performance Engineering

Why us, why now? 

AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) is a not-for-profit association dedicated to transforming health care through innovative medical education, cutting-edge patient care, and groundbreaking medical research. IT Enterprise Applications plays a critical role in supporting AAMC’s mission through diversified workforce, modern architecture, and industry best practices. In 2019, AAMC started a multi-year transformation of its large product portfolio into modern digital platforms while transitioning from on-premises to AWS cloud services. The AAMC IT team strives to deliver innovative solutions and reliable service that enables amazing user experiences, impactful strategies, and new information insights for the AAMC community and staff.  

The AAMC is seeking a Technical Lead, Application Performance Engineering to ensure the overall quality of products by meeting application performance and system capacity requirements. The Technical Lead, Application Performance Engineering has four major areas of responsibilities: 

How you will make an impact 

Develop Performance Engineering Processes and Standards: 

• Develop performance engineering processes, policies, procedures and standards for performance engineering and capacity planning, identify best practices for software quality maturity modeling. 

• Develop documentation templates of performance engineering process policies, standards and procedures, templates, workbooks, checklists, etc. 

Performance Engineering Technology and Strategic Planning: 

• Develop performance engineering technology plan, roadmap, and strategic plan. Evaluate software engineering, test tools and test strategies with the goal of optimizing productivity, quality, and cost-effectiveness. 

• Collaborate with the architecture, engineering, and application development teams to identify performance engineering best practices. 

• Develop and maintain system capacity models through theoretical modeling and extensive experiments to estimate the required hardware resources. 

Technology, Process and Project Management  

• Review and approve production change requests and performance test environment code posts and review the production incidents. 

• Advise and provide guidance to AAMC performance engineering teams, on application performance engineering processes, application performance requirements analysis and capacity planning. Review and approve performance test plans, test scenarios and cases, test results, test reports and analysis, and performance risks. 

• Hands on application code profiling and infrastructure tuning of all critical enterprise applications and services. 

Performance Testing and Capacity Planning for Critical Applications / Business Events 

• Hands on application code profiling and infrastructure tuning of all critical enterprise applications and services. 

• Hands on comprehensive analysis of usage patterns of all layers of networking, application server, applications, databases and identifying key system performance requirements to build usage models, develop test plan and design test scenarios and test cases. 

• Profile application code to identify root causes of performance bottleneck and system resource limitations, as well as the architecture impact. 

• Participate in root-cause analysis of performance problems and conduct tests to support, verify, and validate performance tuning for optimization. 

What you’ll bring to the role 

• Bachelors or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or a similar analytical field 

• 7+ years’ experience in performance engineering processes and performance test processes, policies and standards, and capacity planning for large-scale complex enterprise multi-tier applications and infrastructures. 

• Experience in infrastructure and application code tuning 

• Lead detailed test designs using sound software test engineering principles in the context of test automation platforms and integration across distributed and/or cloud systems. 

• Proven experience in software design and development, database modeling and coding with various programming languages. 

• Experience conducting performance bottleneck detections and root-cause analysis at coding, API transaction, application functionalities and user interaction levels through all application and infrastructure layers. 

• Experience managing software engineering tools, including CM tools of various purposes, performance testing and testing tools and monitoring tools with various technologies at all software development cycles. 

• Experience in continuous delivery of applications and micro-services with performance test automation in a CI/CD infrastructure - Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines, Flyway 

• Design and execute load, stress, endurance, and capacity tests, and analyze and report results 

• Experience developing in Java, JavaScript, shell scripting, Python, or other scripting languages. 

• Proven experience working with New Relic, Splunk, Oracle OEM, OS, CloudWatch. 

• Working knowledge with one or more cloud infrastructure - AWS preferred 

• Experience creating, enhancing, debugging, handling test data, and running tests 

• Knowledge and hands-on experience with performance test automation framework development preferably using JMeter, LoadRunner, and Blazemeter 

• Ability to mentor product team members and promote improvements in their professional skills 

• Experience in testing distributed systems / microservices 

• Experience using Jira and Confluence for documentation and collaboration 

• Experience with project planning and scheduling and resource management 

• Good knowledge in Agile practices such as Scrum and Kanban 

If a bachelor’s degree is required, related work experience may be substituted in some positions. One year of college course work at an accredited institution is equivalent to one year of related work experience. 

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. The AAMC is committed to the policy of an equal employment opportunity in recruitment, hiring, career advancement, and all other personnel practices. The AAMC will not discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, religion, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, family responsibilities, matriculation, political affiliation, genetic information, disability, past or current military service, or any other legally protected characteristic.