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Principal Performance Architect Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Dell GmbH

$188K - $258K/yr

Senior Principal Engineering Technologist Dell's Client Product Group (CPG) is looking for a Senior ... As a System Performance Architect at Dell, you will be responsible for leading & defining the ...

Dell GmbH

WI · On-site

$188K - $258K/yr

Senior Principal Engineering Technologist Dell's Client Product Group (CPG) is looking for a Senior ... As a System Performance Architect at Dell, you will be responsible for leading & defining the ...

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Socket.dev

WI · On-site

$188K - $258K/yr

Senior Principal Engineering Technologist Dell's Client Product Group (CPG) is looking for a Senior ... As a System Performance Architect at Dell, you will be responsible for leading & defining the ...

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Principal Performance Architect information

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$80.5K

$171.4K

$231K

How much do principal performance architect jobs pay per year?

As of Sep 14, 2026, the average yearly pay for principal performance architect in the United States is $171,382.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $145,000.00 and $194,500.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is a principal performance architect?

Principal Performance Architects are senior-level professionals responsible for designing, analyzing, and optimizing the performance of software systems or IT infrastructure. They work to ensure that applications and services run efficiently, reliably, and can scale effectively with increased usage. Their role often involves identifying bottlenecks, recommending improvements, and establishing best practices for performance across development teams. With extensive experience, they also mentor other engineers and collaborate with stakeholders to meet organizational performance goals.

What are the typical challenges a principal performance architect faces when optimizing large-scale enterprise systems?

Principal Performance Architects often encounter challenges such as balancing system scalability with cost efficiency, identifying performance bottlenecks in complex architectures, and aligning optimization strategies with evolving business goals. They must work closely with cross-functional teams—including developers, infrastructure engineers, and product managers—to ensure that solutions are both technically robust and aligned with user needs. Navigating legacy systems and integrating new technologies can also present unique hurdles, requiring strong analytical skills and deep experience with performance testing tools.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as a principal performance architect, and why are they important?

To thrive as a Principal Performance Architect, you need deep expertise in systems architecture, performance engineering, and scalability, often backed by a degree in computer science or related fields. Familiarity with performance analysis tools (e.g., JMeter, Dynatrace), cloud platforms, and scripting languages, along with relevant certifications, is typically expected. Exceptional problem-solving, communication, and leadership skills help you collaborate with cross-functional teams and drive best practices. These skills ensure that large-scale systems operate efficiently, meet business requirements, and deliver optimal user experiences.

What is the difference between Principal Performance Architect vs Performance Engineer?

AspectPrincipal Performance ArchitectPerformance Engineer
CredentialsTypically requires advanced degrees and extensive experience in performance architectureUsually requires a bachelor's or master's in computer science or related field, with relevant performance testing certifications
Work EnvironmentFocuses on designing and overseeing performance strategies across large systems and enterprise environmentsConducts performance testing, analysis, and tuning on specific applications or components
Employer & Industry UsageCommon in large tech firms, financial institutions, and enterprise software companiesUsed across various industries including IT, software development, and consulting firms

The Principal Performance Architect typically leads performance strategy and architecture at an enterprise level, requiring more experience and strategic oversight. Performance Engineers focus on testing and optimizing specific applications or systems. Both roles are essential but differ mainly in scope and seniority.

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Principal Performance Architect jobs near you
Infographic showing various Principal Performance Architect job openings in the United States as of September 2026, with employment types broken down into 100% Full Time. Highlights an 50% In-person, and 50% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $171,382 per year, or $82.4 per hour.

Senior Principal Performance Engineer

Jersey City, NJ • Hybrid

The Depository Trust Clearing
Securities, Commodity Contracts, and Financial Investments • 5 - 10K employees
Learn more about The Depository Trust Clearingexternal

$137K - $189K/yr

Full-time

Medical, Life, Retirement, PTO

This job post has expired today. Applications are no longer accepted.

Key responsibilities

  • Lead the strategy, architecture, and execution of performance engineering, resilience testing, capacity planning, and operational readiness initiatives across complex distributed systems and cloud-native environments.

  • Partner with engineering, infrastructure, architecture, and product teams to identify performance bottlenecks, eliminate systemic risks, and enhance platform resilience.

  • Drive a culture of engineering excellence by championing observability, automation, chaos engineering, disaster recovery preparedness, and continuous performance optimization.

Job description

Are you ready to make an impact at DTCC?   
Do you want to work on innovative projects, collaborate with a dynamic and supportive team, and receive investment in your professional development? At DTCC, we are at the forefront of innovation in the financial markets. We are committed to helping our employees grow and succeed. We believe that you have the skills and drive to make a real impact. We foster a thriving internal community and are committed to creating a workplace that looks like the world that we serve.   
The Information Technology group delivers secure, reliable technology solutions that enable DTCC to be the trusted infrastructure of the global capital markets. The team delivers high-quality information through activities that include development of essential, building infrastructure capabilities to meet client needs and implementing data standards and governance.   
 

Pay and Benefits: 

  • Competitive compensation, including base pay and annual incentive
  • Comprehensive health and life insurance and well-being benefits, based on location
  • Pension / Retirement benefits
  • Paid Time Off and Personal/Family Care, and other leaves of absence when needed to support your physical, financial, and emotional well-being.
  • DTCC offers a flexible/hybrid model of 3 days onsite and 2 days remote (onsite Tuesdays, Wednesdays and a third day unique to each team or employee).

The Impact you will have in this role

As a Senior Principal Performance & Resiliency Engineer, you will play a critical role in ensuring the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of DTCC's most business-critical platforms. You will lead the strategy, architecture, and execution of performance engineering, resilience testing, capacity planning, and operational readiness initiatives across complex distributed systems and cloud-native environments. In this role, you will partner closely with engineering, infrastructure, architecture, and product teams to proactively identify performance bottlenecks, eliminate systemic risks, and enhance platform resilience. Your leadership will help ensure that critical financial market infrastructure systems can meet evolving business demands, regulatory expectations, and client service commitments while maintaining the highest standards of availability and reliability. You will drive a culture of engineering excellence by championing observability, automation, chaos engineering, disaster recovery preparedness, and continuous performance optimization. Your contributions will directly strengthen DTCC's ability to deliver secure, resilient, and highly available services that support global financial markets.
 

Your Primary Responsibilities:
  • Make NFRs measurable and release-gated. Define clear targets for latency, throughput, availability, recovery, and capacity, and validate them under production-like volume before release.
  • Embed continuous performance and resilience validation. Automate regression testing and failure-injection scenarios in CI so reliability issues are identified before production impact.
  • Establish estate-wide observability and readiness standards. Create a common instrumentation, SLI, and capacity-planning baseline so risk platforms can scale, recover, and be operated consistently across the estate.

Qualifications:

  • Minimum of 10 years of related experience
  • Bachelor's degree preferred or equivalent experience

Talents Needed for Success:

  • 10+ years of hands-on performance engineering and reliability experience in latency-sensitive or high-volume transaction systems, with continued depth in profiling, dump analysis, and test harness development. 
  • Strong performance engineering discipline across load, stress, soak, and spike testing, using workload models grounded in real production traffic and analyzing results through p99 and p99.9 behavior rather than averages.
  • Deep diagnostic capability across JVM tuning, heap and thread dump analysis, flame graphs, async profiling, and bottleneck isolation across application, database, network, and storage layers-even when standard dashboards appear healthy.
  • Resiliency and chaos engineering expertise including fault injection, failure-mode cataloging, game day design, and DR exercises supported by measured RTO/RPO evidence.
  • Distributed systems and data platform performance depth spanning Kafka throughput, consumer lag, rebalancing, partition skew, backpressure, exactly-once tradeoffs, object storage, lakehouse query performance, and Snowflake warehouse tuning.
  • Observability architecture experience covering OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, metrics taxonomy, SLI/SLO and error budget design, actionable alerting, and disciplined control of cardinality and telemetry cost.
  • Automation embedded into delivery pipelines through CI performance gates, automated baselining, regression detection, and practical test data and environment strategies for constrained end-to-end environments.
  • Broad tooling proficiency with engineering depth across JMeter, Gatling or k6; Prometheus and Grafana; Dynatrace, Datadog or Splunk; and the ability to build custom harnesses when standard tools do not fit the workload.
  • Regulated environment fluency including DR obligations, production readiness reviews, audit evidence, and disciplined incident and postmortem practices.
  • Influence without authority with the credibility to set and enforce NFR standards across delivery squads and support release-readiness decisions with clear, evidence-based judgment.
     
The salary range is indicative for roles at the same level within DTCC across all US locations. Actual salary is determined based on the role, location, individual experience, skills, and other considerations. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.
With over 50 years of experience, DTCC is the premier post-trade market infrastructure for the global financial services industry. From 20 locations around the world, DTCC, through its subsidiaries, automates, centralizes, and standardizes the processing of financial transactions, mitigating risk, increasing transparency, enhancing performance and driving efficiency for thousands of broker/dealers, custodian banks and asset managers. Industry owned and governed, the firm innovates purposefully, simplifying the complexities of clearing, settlement, asset servicing, transaction processing, trade reporting and data services across asset classes, bringing enhanced resilience and soundness to existing financial markets while advancing the digital asset ecosystem. In 2024, DTCC's subsidiaries processed securities transactions valued at U.S. $3.7 quadrillion and its depository subsidiary provided custody and asset servicing for securities issues from over 150 countries and territories valued at U.S. $99 trillion. DTCC's Global Trade Repository service, through locally registered, licensed, or approved trade repositories, processes more than 25 billion messages annually. To learn more, please visit us at www.dtcc.com or connect with us on LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

DTCC proudly supports Flexible Work Arrangements favoring openness and gives people freedom to do their jobs well, by encouraging diverse opinions and emphasizing teamwork.  When you join our team, you'll have an opportunity to make meaningful contributions at a company that is recognized as a thought leader in both the financial services and technology industries. A DTCC career is more than a good way to earn a living. It's the chance to make a difference at a company that's truly one of a kind.

Learn more about Clearance and Settlement by clicking here.

Serves as a dedicated technology resource for advancing DTCC's business opportunities and providing industry thought leadership for leveraging new technology. The goal of this new department is to partner internally with IT, our business and regulatory divisions and externally with clients, regulators, and fintech vendors, to help build new platforms and business models to advance DTCC's mission to support the financial markets.

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