Performance Engineer
Xanadu builds and operates the high-performance exchange technology that powers Matchbook and other trading-style platforms. Our systems behave much closer to electronic financial markets than traditional betting platforms: ultra-low latency, API-driven, highly concurrent, and designed to scale globally.
With continued expansion into new markets, system performance, reliability, and predictability are more critical than ever.
As a Performance Engineer, you will help ensure our trading systems remain fast, stable, and resilient under rapidly growing and highly variable workloads. You'll work on large-scale distributed systems, shaping the performance characteristics of services that process hundreds of millions of daily requests and billions of dollars in transactions.
This role is ideal for engineers who thrive at the intersection of systems engineering, performance analytics, large-scale distributed architecture, and deep observability.
Key Responsibilities
Performance Engineering & Benchmarking
* Design, implement, and maintain repeatable performance, load, stress, and soak testing frameworks for backend trading and market-data systems.
* Develop robust NFR (Non-Functional Requirements) test suites aligned with reliability targets, system SLAs, and internal capacity planning models.
* Build automated performance pipelines to ensure degradation is detected early in the development lifecycle.
* Profile system behaviour under peak loads to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and scaling limits.
Observability, Monitoring & Diagnostics
* Implement and extend performance dashboards using Grafana, Prometheus, and related telemetry tools, enabling deep visibility into service latency, concurrency, throughput, and resource usage.
* Conduct advanced investigations using metrics, logs, traces, and flame graphs to isolate hotspots and improve system responsiveness.
* Work closely with System and Platform Engineering to refine alerting, SLIs/SLOs, and performance-related indicators.
Capacity Planning & System Resilience
* Perform load forecasting for traffic spikes (sporting events, liquidity surges, seasonal peaks) and integrate findings into system scaling strategies.
* Assess architectural resilience and make data-driven recommendations for improvements in throughput, latency, failover behaviour, and resource utilisation.
* Participate in game-days and resilience testing exercises to validate disaster-recovery and high-availability strategies.
Collaboration & Cross-Functional Engineering
* Work closely with development teams to embed performance awareness in design discussions, CI/CD pipelines, and release planning.
* Provide technical mentorship to engineers on performance best practices and system optimisation.
* Communicate findings clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders, including operations and product teams.
Required Skills & Experience
Core Expertise
* 5+ years of hands-on experience in performance engineering for high-traffic, distributed systems.
* Strong expertise with JMeter or equivalent performance testing frameworks.
* Deep understanding of JVM internals, memory management, garbage collectors, and concurrency.
* Experience integrating performance tests into CI/CD and automated environments.
Observability & Diagnostics
* Hands-on experience with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/ElasticStack, or comparable APM tools.
* Ability to interpret metrics and traces and turn them into actionable optimisation insights.
* Experience analysing logs and telemetry to diagnose performance degradation.
Programming & Systems Knowledge
* Strong knowledge of scripting languages (Bash, Python or similar) for automation and tooling.
* Solid understanding of Linux, networking fundamentals, and distributed-system behaviour.
* Knowledge of API testing and backend service architectures (REST, RPC, microservices).
Nice to Have
* Experience with RabbitMQ, Kafka or other high-throughput messaging / streaming systems..
* Familiarity with AWS cloud environments, scaling strategies, and distributed compute.
* Exposure to pytest or UI automation frameworks (Selenium/Playwright).
* Experience with mobile automation frameworks (XCUITest, Espresso).
* Experience with trading, financial, or exchange-style systems is a plus.
Personal Attributes
* Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a focus on data-driven decisions.
* Ability to work under pressure and deliver in time-sensitive environments.
* Ownership mindset: accountable for outcomes and continuous improvement.
* Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.
* Proven ability to collaborate effectively across engineering teams.
Qualifications
* Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field from a recognised university or institute.