Who are we?
Smarsh empowers its customers to manage risk and unleash intelligence in their digital communications. Our growing community of over 6500 organizations in regulated industries counts on Smarsh every day to help them spot compliance, legal or reputational risks in 80+ communication channels before those risks become regulatory fines or headlines. Relentless innovation has fueled our journey to consistent leadership recognition from analysts like Gartner and Forrester, and our sustained, aggressive growth has landed Smarsh in the annual Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing American companies since 2008.
This is a Lead Developer role with a strong focus on performance engineering. You will spend your time building and optimizing high-throughput, low-latency systems at scale — writing production Java code, hunting down bottlenecks, and making the platform faster and more resilient.
Performance is the through-line of everything you do: you'll set performance requirements, design and execute the testing that validates them, profile and tune the system end-to-end, and build the engineering practices that keep it fast release over release. You'll work on services built on Kafka, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Debezium, and Spring Boot running on AWS.
The “lead” in this role is technical, not managerial. You lead through hands-on work, strong engineering judgment, and by raising the performance bar for the people around you — through design and code reviews, mentoring, and setting standards — while remaining a core contributor in the codebase.
Remain hands-on: write, review, and debug production-quality Java code as a core, day-to-day part of the role.
Design, build, and execute performance test suites (load, stress, soak, spike, and scalability tests) and integrate them into CI/CD pipelines.
Profile applications to identify bottlenecks across CPU, memory, GC, threading, I/O, event streaming (Kafka), data stores (MongoDB, Elasticsearch), CDC (Debezium), and network layers, and drive them to resolution.
Hands-on expertise across the following stack: Apache Kafka — event streaming, partitioning, consumer groups, and tuning for high-volume throughput.
Strong skills in profiling and diagnostics using tools such as JProfiler, YourKit, async-profiler, VisualVM, or Java Flight Recorder.
Solid experience diagnosing performance issues across the full stack — application, event streaming, database, search, caching, and messaging.
Familiarity with observability and APM tooling (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace) for monitoring and root-cause analysis.
About our culture
Smarsh hires lifelong learners with a passion for innovating with purpose, humility and humor. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. We work closely with the most popular communications platforms and the world’s leading cloud infrastructure platforms. We use the latest in AI/ML technology to help our customers break new ground at scale. We are a global organization that values diversity, and we believe that providing opportunities for everyone to be their authentic self is key to our success. Smarsh leadership, culture, and commitment to developing our people have all garnered Comparably.com Best Places to Work Awards. Come join us and find out what the best work of your career looks like.
