Senior Performance Engineer Jobs in Laurel, MD (NOW HIRING)

About Us

eSimplicity is a modern digital services company that partners with government agencies to improve the lives and protect the well-being of all Americans, from veterans and service members to children, families, and seniors. Our engineers, designers, and strategists cut through complexity to create intuitive products and services that equip federal agencies with solutions to courageously transform today for a better tomorrow.

Purpose and Scope:

We are seeking an Associate Performance Engineer with performance engineering expertise to support a federal financial regulatory agency's cloud-based enterprise data platform. In this role, you will assist with tuning, troubleshooting, load-testing large-scale data pipelines and querying workloads across AWS Glue/PySpark, MWAA/Airflow, S3, Iceberg/Parquet, Athena/Trino, and PostgreSQL/Redshift, ensuring reliable, cost-efficient operations at the scale of a large portfolio of automated production jobs processing terabyte-to-petabyte data volumes.

Successful candidates will be eligible to hold a U.S. Federal Public Trust security clearance (Moderate Risk). This position is contingent upon contract award.

Responsibilities

• Assist with Performance Tuning: collaborating with a senior engineer, assist in analyzing and tuning Spark/PySpark and AWS Glue job performance (including partitioning, clustering, batch sizing, and file format optimization such as Parquet, ORC, Iceberg).
• Support Query Optimization: help optimize query performance across Athena, Trino, PostgreSQL, Redshift, and semantic-layer objects (e.g., tables, views, materialized views) contributing to the efficient execution of user queries, reports, and dashboards.
• Collaborative Troubleshooting: assist in identifying, diagnosing, and resolving failed production jobs and performance bottlenecks to ensure data engineers can maintain data availability, integrity, and accuracy to comply with ingestion timelines and zero data-loss requirements.
• Support Performance Testing: participate in periodic load and performance tests; assist in defining benchmarks, documenting/analyzing results, and drafting test reports with recommendations for system improvements.
• Pipeline Monitoring: monitor pipeline health using CloudWatch, ETL metadata, log analysis, and dashboards; assist in hardening/optimizing error handling and automated job notifications.
• Team Collaboration: coordinate with developers, testers, and stakeholders to resolve technical issues; participate actively in agile ceremonies and Program Increment planning events.
• Production Operations Support: work as part of a team to support production operations across a large data pipeline portfolio, including (but not limited to) participating in a team on-call rotation for troubleshooting production issues and outages, defining and integrating performance and reliability requirements into ETL designs, shared code libraries, and enterprise ETL standards.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related technical discipline. OR;
• In lieu of a degree, four additional years of related, specialized experience is required
• Minimum of 4 years of experience in performance engineering, data engineering, or quality engineering for large-scale, data-centric systems.
• Hands-on experience tuning Apache Spark/PySpark workloads and AWS Glue jobs.
• Experience with workflow orchestration using Airflow/MWAA or similar tools.
• Experience optimizing queries and storage across S3-based data lakes (Iceberg/Parquet), query engines (Athena or Trino), and relational databases (PostgreSQL, Redshift, or Oracle).
• Foundational proficiency in Python and SQL.
• Experience with load/performance testing and production troubleshooting of automated data pipelines at scale.
• Strong analytical, root-cause analysis, and communication skills.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Moderate Risk Public Trust clearance; residing in the United States.

Desired Qualifications:

• Experience with AWS cloud cost optimization.
• Experience supporting operations across hundreds of concurrent scheduled pipelines.
• Familiarity with CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code, and federal security and compliance requirements (FISMA, NIST 800-53, Zero Trust, Section 508, the Privacy Act of 1974).
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools for debugging and performance tuning.
• Experience with financial or regulatory datasets.
• Willingness to support disaster recovery exercises and learn enterprise-level ETL best practice standards under senior guidance.

Working Environment:

eSimplicity supports a hybrid work environment operating within the Eastern time zone so we can work with and respond to our government clients. Expected hours are 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Eastern unless otherwise directed by your manager.

Occasional travel for training and project meetings. It is estimated to be less than 5% per year.

Benefits:

eSimplicity offers a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k) retirement benefits, paid time off, paid holidays, life and disability insurance, and additional wellness and employee support programs. Eligibility may vary based on employment status and applicable plan terms.

Reasonable Accommodation:

eSimplicity is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities during the application and hiring process. Applicants who need assistance or accommodation should contact Human Resources.

Equal Employment Opportunity:

eSimplicity is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including disability and protected veteran status. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.