Senior Performance Engineer

About Ping Identity: 

At Ping Identity, we believe in making digital experiences both secure and seamless for all users, without compromise. We call this digital freedom. And it's not just something we provide our customers. It's something that inspires our company. People don't come here to join a culture that's built on digital freedom. They come to cultivate it. 

Our intelligent, cloud identity platform lets people shop, work, bank, and interact wherever and however they want. Without friction. Without fear. 

While protecting digital identities is at the core of our technology, protecting individual identities is at the core of our culture. We champion every identity. One of our core values, Respect Individuality, reminds us to celebrate differences so you are empowered to bring your authentic self to work. 

We're headquartered in Denver, Colorado and we have offices and employees around the globe. We serve the largest, most demanding enterprises worldwide, including more than half of the Fortune 100. At Ping Identity, we're changing the way people and businesses think about cybersecurity, digital experiences, and identity and access management. 

Role Purpose Statement:

We are looking for a Senior Performance Engineer to independently plan and execute performance engineering activities for large-scale identity services running in cloud-native environments.

In this horizontal role, you will work across product engineering, cloud/SRE, and customer-facing teams to assess scalability and reliability, identify and resolve performance risks, investigate bottlenecks, and improve performance readiness across complex end-to-end flows. You will own performance work from planning through execution, analysis, documentation, stakeholder communication, and completion, with minimal supervision.

Main Responsibilities:

• Define and execute performance testing strategies for Identity Management products and services.
• Plan and execute holistic system-level load, scalability, endurance, stress, reliability, regression, baseline, and benchmark tests.
• Define meaningful performance metrics, analyze results, identify trends and trade-offs, and communicate findings clearly to engineering, cloud/SRE, product, and customer-facing stakeholders.
• Analyze performance results and troubleshoot, isolate, and perform root-cause analysis on performance and reliability issues across multiple product components.
• Coordinate with engineering teams to implement and verify fixes and ensure performance risks are addressed through completion.
• Perform Java application profiling, stack tuning, memory analysis, and optimization using appropriate profiling, monitoring, and diagnostic tools.
• Help determine configurations for optimal performance, capacity planning, and resource sizing across virtualized and containerized environments.
• Identify opportunities to improve performance-test automation and contribute improvements to continuous-integration workflows.
• Maintain and contribute to documentation covering performance test methods, results, tuning guidance, capacity planning, and troubleshooting.
• Own performance responsibilities for assigned product components across relevant phases of the product development lifecycle, including design, development, testing, deployment, release, and operations.
• Participate independently in customer engagements, technical escalations, onboarding activities, and customer-like performance investigations.
• Provide technical leadership on small performance initiatives, mentor engineers, and identify improvements to team processes and practices.
• Evaluate relevant tools, frameworks, technologies, and industry developments and use that knowledge to improve product performance and engineering practices.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Proven experience developing and executing load, scalability, endurance, stress, reliability, regression, baseline, and benchmark tests.
• Experience planning and executing performance testing from a holistic system perspective with minimal supervision.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot, isolate, and perform root-cause analysis on end-to-end performance and reliability issues.
• Strong experience with modern load-generation, measurement, observability, monitoring, and profiling tools.
• Ability to write performance tests and automation in Python, Java, Scala, Go, or a comparable scripting or programming language.
• Experience performance-testing LDAP, Java, web, and distributed applications in regional, cloud, or hybrid deployments.
• Experience troubleshooting end-to-end environment and configuration issues, including load balancing and network-related behavior.
• Experience with Java stack tuning, profiling, debugging, and optimization.
• Proficiency with JVM internals as they relate to performance tuning, garbage collection, and memory management.
• Solid grounding in modern software engineering practices, design patterns, automation, and maintainable test development.
• Solid understanding of Internet and service fundamentals, including TCP/IP, HTTP(S), SSL/TLS, and common distributed-service protocols.
• Experience running large-scale performance tests in cloud environments, especially Kubernetes.
• Proven cloud development and automation skills using virtual machines, containers, and infrastructure or deployment automation.
• Ability to communicate complex technical findings, risks, recommendations, and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrated collaboration, mentoring, and technical leadership skills in distributed global teams.
• 5+ years of software development experience, including substantial experience with Java.
• 5+ years of experience in performance engineering or a closely related discipline.
• Experience with identity and access management and standards such as OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and WebAuthn.
• Demonstrated ability to work independently, consistently deliver high-quality results, and take accountability for work through completion.

Preferred:

• Experience with Gatling, JMeter, or comparable performance-testing tools.
• Experience with Java performance profiling and optimization in production-like environments.
• Kubernetes and GKE or AWS experience, including application resource measurement and sizing.
• Experience improving performance testing through AI-assisted analysis, automation, or test design.
• Experience producing performance troubleshooting, tuning, or capacity-planning documentation for broad internal or external use.

Life at Ping:

We believe in and facilitate a flexible, collaborative work environment. We’re growing quickly, but remain true to the innovative, can-do startup values that got us here. Most importantly, we keep hiring talented, smart, fun, and genuinely nice people because that’s who we want to succeed with every day. 

Here are just a few of the things that make Ping special:

• A company culture that empowers you to do your best work.
• Employee Resource Groups that create a sense of belonging for everyone.
• Regular company and team bonding events.
• Competitive benefits and perks.
• Global volunteering and community initiatives

Our Benefits: 

• Generous PTO & Holiday Schedule 
• Parental Leave
• Progressive Healthcare Options
• Retirement Programs
• Opportunity for Education Reimbursement 
• Commuter Offset (Specific locations) 

Ping is the collective sum of all our individual experiences, backgrounds and influences and we pride ourselves in growing and learning together. We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse environment where everyone’s individuality is respected and everyone has an Identity. In recruiting for new colleagues, we welcome the unique contributions you can bring and encourage you to be your best self.

We are an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex including sexual orientation and gender identity, national origin, disability, protected Veteran Status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.