Lead Reliability & Performance Engineer

Duties & Responsibilities

• Defines and maintains service-level indicators, service-level objectives, reliability dashboards, alert thresholds, and error-budget reporting for critical PLM services.
• Engineers full-stack observability across Windchill, ThingWorx, Java/JVM processes, web tiers, queues, integrations, databases, operating systems, cloud infrastructure, storage, and network dependencies using Dynatrace and complementary platform telemetry.
• Builds automated health checks, synthetic monitors, anomaly detection, and actionable alerts that distinguish user-impacting conditions from noise and accelerate detection and diagnosis.
• Leads technical triage for complex availability and performance incidents; correlates logs, metrics, traces, thread dumps, heap behavior, database activity, operating-system statistics, and recent changes to isolate root cause.
• Restores service safely during incidents, documents timelines and evidence, contributes to blameless post-incident reviews, and implements corrective and preventive actions.
• Performs workload characterization, baselining, capacity modeling, trend analysis, and performance testing to identify saturation points and forecast compute, memory, storage, database, and network demand.
• Contributes to the tuning and optimization of Linux and Windows environments across application configurations, web tiers, database interactions, indexing, file-vault operations, and AWS resources.
• Designs, develops, tests, documents, and supports reusable automation for server provisioning, application installation, environment refresh and rehost, configuration synchronization, certificate management, patch readiness, service recovery, compliance checks, backups, and routine maintenance.
• Maintains automation as version-controlled software with peer review, testing, logging, error handling, security controls, idempotent execution, rollback or recovery procedures, and clear ownership.
• Eliminates operational toil by identifying repetitive, error-prone work, quantifying its impact, prioritizing high-value automation, and measuring reliability, cycle-time, risk, and cost improvements.
• Partners with development teams to configure and maintain application environments across DEV, QA, and PROD.
• Provides technical readiness support for platform upgrades, migrations, new OpCo onboarding, data-migration releases, cloud modernization, and architectural changes.
• Coordinates with infrastructure, database, Linux, Windows, network, storage, security, validation, application support, managed-service, and software-vendor teams to resolve cross-layer issues.
• Implements and verifies security and compliance controls including patching evidence, certificate lifecycle, service-account and credential hygiene, least-privilege access, vulnerability remediation, configuration records, and audit-ready operational documentation.
• Participates in an on-call rotation and provides support outside standard business hours for production incidents, planned maintenance, releases, and critical platform activities.
• Creates and maintains runbooks, architecture and dependency records, monitoring standards, automation documentation, recovery procedures, known-error records, and knowledge-transfer materials.
• Mentors engineers and service partners in troubleshooting, performance analysis, observability, safe automation, and SRE practices.
• Responsible for communicating business-related issues or opportunities to the next management level.

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related discipline; equivalent relevant experience may be considered.

Experience and Skills

• 8 years of experience in site reliability engineering, systems engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, application infrastructure, or production operations for enterprise applications.
• 8 years of hands-on Linux and scripting/automation experience using Chef, Ruby, Bash, Python, PowerShell, or comparable languages.
• Demonstrated experience supporting PTC Windchill and/or ThingWorx in multi-node enterprise environments; comparable PLM platforms may be considered with strong Java-platform operations expertise.
• Experience diagnosing Java enterprise application performance using logs, metrics, traces, thread dumps, heap analysis, garbage-collection behavior, database evidence, and operating-system telemetry.
• Experience operating AWS-hosted enterprise systems and collaborating across compute, storage, networking, identity, security, database, backup, and disaster-recovery services.
• Experience developing production-grade operational automation and integrating it with version control, CI/CD, work tracking, secrets management, and monitoring.
• Experience supporting validated or regulated systems in MedTech, Life Sciences, or another controlled environment is strongly preferred.

Other Required Skills and Knowledge

• Hands-on administration and troubleshooting knowledge of PTC Windchill, ThingWorx, clustered or multi-node application patterns, Apache/Tomcat, Oracle, SQL Server, Java/JVM, background processing, queues, indexing, integrations, certificates, and file-vault or shared storage services.
• Observability experience with Dynatrace or comparable platform; ability to create dashboards, service views, synthetic monitors, alerting profiles, problem-detection rules, and evidence-based performance investigations.
• Linux administration and strong shell scripting skills; strong working knowledge of Windows administration.
• Programming and automation skills in Bash and Python; Chef, Ruby, PowerShell, Java, REST APIs, SQL, JSON, XML, YAML, and infrastructure-as-code experience are preferred.
• AWS operations knowledge covering compute, storage, network connectivity, load balancing, identity and access, monitoring, backup, resiliency, and cost-aware resource sizing.
• Database troubleshooting competence for Oracle and PostgreSQL, including connection behavior, long-running queries, locking, capacity, and collaboration with database administrators on tuning.
• Experience with Bitbucket or Git, Jenkins or equivalent CI/CD tooling, Jira, Confluence, artifact repositories, and controlled deployment processes.
• Ability to automate safely in regulated environments using documented requirements, testing, peer review, segregation of duties, evidence retention, change control, rollback planning, and validation alignment.
• Strong analytical troubleshooting, technical writing, stakeholder communication, and vendor coordination skills.
• AI fluency: ability to use and evaluate AI-assisted engineering and operations capabilities responsibly while maintaining human review, security, privacy, and governance requirements.
• Preferred certifications: AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Dynatrace certification, ITIL Foundation or comparable reliability/cloud credentials.