Senior Software Performance Engineer

About the Role

Help scale the performance engineering discipline across Blackbaud — building the tooling, practices, and expertise that let dev and ops teams do their own performance analysis, while staying hands-on enough to solve the hardest problems yourself and mentor others.

Our core stack is Kubernetes/Azure-based microservices, though you'll occasionally support older, more monolithic systems too — the core skills (profiling, load testing, root-cause analysis) transfer directly.

This is a hands-on coding role: most of your time goes to building and maintaining our load/synthetic test tooling (including AI-assisted testing) and integrating it into our SDLC. The rest is split between observability tooling and ad hoc performance analysis, with strong ownership of latency, throughput, and resource efficiency.

What You'll Do

Load & Synthetic Test Tooling

• Build and maintain our synthetic/load-testing framework — test development (Playwright/Gatling), execution, and reporting.
• Apply AI capabilities to improve test development — AI-assisted authoring, scenario generation, result analysis.
• Integrate performance and synthetic tests into CI/CD pipelines so checks run continuously, not just ad hoc.

Observability & Ad Hoc Performance Analysis

• Improve observability tooling (Splunk, Grafana, Honeycomb, App Insights, AppDynamics, New Relic): dashboards, alerting, SLIs/SLOs, instrumentation.
• Run load, stress, and soak tests to catch bottlenecks before production; profile CPU, memory, GC, I/O, and network in C#/.NET and/or Java services.
• Troubleshoot production performance issues (latency regressions, resource exhaustion, throttling) and tune resource usage in Kubernetes/AKS (requests/limits, autoscaling, kubectl diagnostics).

Ongoing

• Build self-serve performance capabilities (dashboards, guardrails, docs) so teams can diagnose issues without escalating.
• Design and maintain C#/.NET and/or Java microservices with a focus on performance and scalability.
• Collaborate via Agile/GitHub workflows and mentor junior engineers on profiling and troubleshooting.

What You'll Bring

• 6+ years of software engineering experience with meaningful exposure to performance, scalability, or reliability engineering.
• Strong C#/.NET and/or Java skills, plus strong Azure experience.
• Solid grasp of how compute resources (CPU, memory, I/O, network) drive performance/scalability, including tuning in containerized environments.
• Hands-on experience with a load-testing tool (k6, JMeter, Locust, Gatling) and a browser-automation tool for synthetic/end-to-end testing (Selenium, Cypress, Playwright).
• Experience with profiling tools (dotnet-trace, PerfView, App Insights profiler) and observability/APM tooling (Splunk, Grafana, Honeycomb, AppDynamics, New Relic).
• Some experience applying AI/LLM tools to dev workflows (AI-assisted coding, test generation, analysis).
• Experience integrating tooling/tests into CI/CD (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions) and troubleshooting production performance issues.
• Working knowledge of Linux fundamentals and networking basics (DNS, TLS, routing) as they relate to performance.
• Experience with Agile/GitHub, strong documentation and communication skills, and comfort working across time zones.

You'll Thrive in This Role If You

• Are self-motivated and comfortable driving your own investigations without step-by-step direction.
• Have systemic curiosity — you want to understand how a system behaves end-to-end, and think across layers from application code down through infrastructure and database.
• Question assumptions and keep digging until you find the actual root cause, not just the first plausible explanation.

Nice to Have

• Gatling or Playwright experience specifically.
• AKS experience (cluster ops, node pools, scaling) with a performance/capacity lens.
• Front-end development experience using Angular/TypeScript.
• Database-layer performance troubleshooting (query plans, indexing, stored procedure tuning).
• Familiarity with distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), capacity planning and cost/performance trade-off analysis.

Quick Summary

“Backend-heavy engineer who codes daily, hunts down and fixes performance bottlenecks, and operates production systems; strong in C#/.NET and/or Java, Azure, compute/resource performance fundamentals, load testing, and observability.”

Stay up to date on everything Blackbaud, follow us on Linkedin, X, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube ​

Blackbaud powers social impact through purpose‑driven technology and responsible AI. Guided by our Intelligence for Good® vision, we’re building a culture where innovation, trust, and human expertise come together to help organizations make a greater difference in the world.

Blackbaud is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to maintaining an inclusive work environment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, physical or mental disability, age, or veteran status or any other basis protected by federal, state, or local law.