Job Specifications
As a Director, Performance Engineering, you will lead the charge in protecting and elevating the world’s most established low‑latency, high‑throughput market data and news distribution system for LSEG. Each day, our platform ingests 120 billion messages and distributes them globally at rates exceeding 2 trillion messages, serving the most demanding participants in the global financial ecosystem. This role is pivotal in ensuring the platform remains ultra‑reliable, predictable at scale, and continuously optimized—across both on‑prem and private cloud (EKS) environments.
You will build and lead a world‑class Performance Engineering function responsible for the performance, capacity, scalability, efficiency, and resiliency of real‑time services. Your team will partner closely with SRE, RT Platform Tools & Automation, Architecture, Product Engineering squads, and Ops Excellence to ensure our RT workloads consistently meet stringent latency, throughput, jitter, and concurrency expectations under all conditions.
What You Will Own
Performance Engineering Leadership
Build and lead the Performance Engineering team for one of the world’s highest‑scale, lowest‑latency market data systems.
Own performance engineering strategy, roadmaps, and capability development across global engineering teams.
Define and evolve performance engineering methodologies, tooling, standards, and golden paths across RT Engineering.
Performance Testing & Advanced Diagnostics
Lead the creation and continuous improvement of performance, load, stress, soak, and chaos testing frameworks embedded into CI/CD.
Oversee deep‑dive analysis of system performance across the entire stack: application code, middleware, OS, networking, storage, hardware, and cloud infrastructure.
Develop and enforce methodologies for identifying bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and performance regressions before they reach production.
Performance Baselines & NFR Validation
Establish and maintain baseline performance signatures for all RT workloads, ensuring consistent detection of early performance degradation.
Validate services and platforms against NFRs (latency, throughput, concurrency, resource usage, jitter) in collaboration with Architecture and SRE.
Ensure reliability, performance, and release readiness through robust performance evidence and go/no‑go criteria.
Capacity & Scalability Engineering
Work with SRE to drive capacity forecasting, headroom analysis, and saturation modelling for both on‑prem and cloud workloads.
Ensure RT systems scale predictably using best‑in‑class autoscaling patterns, resource tuning, and workload‑aware optimization.
Collaborate with RT Platform Tools & Automation to embed performance guardrails, IaC patterns, and autoscaling strategies at the platform level.
Incident & Risk Management
Partner with SRE on performance‑related incident reviews, ensuring deep root cause analysis and long‑term remediation.
Collaborate with Ops Excellence team to ensure performance‑related risks are identified, governed, and visibly reported.
Drive continual improvement initiatives that reduce recurrence of performance and capacity degradation.
Cross‑Functional Partnering
Partner with Architecture to embed performance considerations into service design, reference architectures, and platform evolution.
Work closely with Tech Biz Mgmt to align performance engineering insights with cost efficiency, supplier performance, and investment decisions.
Collaborate with Product Engineering squads to ensure code‑level performance optimization and NFR compliance.
What You’ll Bring
Leadership & Influence
Proven leadership in building global engineering functions or performance engineering organizations.
Ability to operate at executive level, articulate complex technical concepts clearly, and influence senior stakeholders.
High emotional intelligence, with the ability to navigate organizational complexity and influence outcomes across multiple groups.
Technical Depth & Domain Expertise
15+ years of experience in high‑scale, real‑time engineering environments (preferably financial services, exchanges, trading, or market data).
Expertise in C++, modern distributed systems, multithreading, concurrency, real‑time messaging, caching, and lock‑free programming.
Solid base in operating system internals, kernel tuning, networking stacks, and low‑latency optimization.
Deep experience in performance tuning, profiling, instrumentation, and debugging across heterogeneous environments.
Experience with non-functional testing, performance automation, and quality engineering practices.
Strong understanding of queueing theory, back‑pressure, GC performance, and high-throughput system behavior.
Experience with performance engineering for containers, Kubernetes/EKS, and hybrid cloud environments.
Solid background in database optimization, high‑performance storage, and event‑driven architectures.
Execution & Delivery
Proven track record leading large‑scale technology transform