Performance and Resiliency Engineering Lead, Merchant Services (Senior Vice President or Executive Director)

Merchant Services is hiring an SVP/ED Performance & Resiliency Engineer to improve the performance and stability of critical, high-volume platforms. The role focuses on latency reduction, throughput/TPS improvements, capacity planning, and peak-event readiness, while also strengthening resiliency and release safety.

You will partner closely with application development teams and infrastructure/platform engineering to identify bottlenecks across the stack (application/runtime, database, network, compute, and platform), implement durable fixes, and raise engineering standards through technical leadership, mentorship, and strong cross-team collaboration.

Key responsibilities

• Lead performance engineering efforts: load/stress/soak testing, capacity modeling, performance tuning, and regression prevention (KPIs, guardrails, and acceptance criteria).
• Improve production readiness: observability (metrics/logs/traces/APM), actionable alerting, incident triage, and root-cause analysis leading to durable remediation.
• Strengthen resiliency patterns: timeouts/retries, circuit breakers, backpressure/rate limiting, graceful degradation, and failover readiness.
• Drive safer releases via canary/progressive delivery and automated rollback patterns.
• Optimize containerized workloads across EKS (primary) and ECS/other compute where applicable; drive autoscaling strategy and right-sizing.

Qualifications

• Senior experience in performance engineering for distributed systems and/or SRE-style reliability engineering in production.
• Strong cloud/container background (AWS + Kubernetes/EKS; ECS exposure beneficial).
• Experience with modern observability tooling (e.g., Datadog, Dynatrace, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch or equivalent).
• KEDA and/or Karpenter: large plus.
• Akamai: strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, mentor engineers, and work effectively across teams.