Cloud Performance Engineer
Posted on Oct 23, 2026
Join the team that serves as Apple’s nerve center: Information Systems and Technology (IS&T). From Apple Pay and the Apple Online Store to our global data center operations, IS&T designs, builds, and runs the critical enterprise systems that millions of customers and employees rely on every day. The SAP Quality Engineering team safeguards the performance, resilience, and scalability of Apple’s mission-critical SAP systems and cloud-hosted enterprise applications. In this role, you will take ownership of end-to-end performance across cloud environments—with a primary focus on Alibaba Cloud alongside AWS. You will work across application runtimes, cloud infrastructure, databases, and networks, ensuring our platforms maintain exceptional responsiveness and reliability under real-world enterprise scale.
As a Cloud Performance Engineer, you will own the end-to-end performance and capacity engineering for enterprise applications hosted on cloud infrastructure. You will design high-fidelity performance test scenarios, decompose latency across complex global network and application paths, and identify bottlenecks before they impact users. In addition, you will partner closely with architecture, database, and software engineering teams to establish performance baselines, build actionable observability, and guide technical sign-offs for production workloads.
- Architect and execute comprehensive performance, load, stress, and soak test scenarios that accurately model real-world business concurrency, data volumes, and mixed-load endurance behavior.
- Engineer and optimize cloud infrastructure primarily on Alibaba Cloud—with complementary depth on AWS—tuning Kubernetes clusters, autoscaling behaviors, compute/storage sizing, load balancers, and network latency.
- Decompose and resolve latency across the complete request lifecycle, evaluating DNS, TLS, proxies, API gateways, application runtimes, and backend databases such as SAP HANA.
- Build deep observability and automated monitoring solutions using metrics, logs, and distributed tracing platforms, incorporating AI-assisted tooling for anomaly detection and rapid root-cause analysis.
- Optimize event-driven architectures and publish-subscribe pipelines on Kafka and enterprise event brokers, tuning topic partitioning, consumer lag, throughput, and backpressure handling.
- Lead production incident investigations and post-go-live triage under tight deadlines, conducting thorough root cause analysis and collaborating with engineering teams to deploy lasting fixes.
- Drive capacity and cost-to-performance modeling during architectural reviews, establishing performance benchmarks, entry/exit criteria, and automated test integration within continuous delivery pipelines.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of experience in software or performance engineering, with demonstrated ownership of production performance for enterprise cloud applications.
- Hands-on experience engineering and tuning cloud-hosted applications on Alibaba Cloud, along with production experience on AWS.
- Experience configuring, sizing, and performance-tuning relational databases, including SAP HANA, on cloud infrastructure.
- Experience modeling realistic workloads and conducting load, stress, soak, and capacity testing using tools such as Apache JMeter, k6, Gatling, or LoadRunner Enterprise.
- Experience decomposing latency across complex multi-tier architectures and utilizing telemetry to identify root causes and quantify improvements.
- Experience managing production performance incidents, including real-time triage and authoring detailed technical root cause analyses.
- Professional working proficiency in English.
- Experience operating enterprise workloads in China regions on Alibaba Cloud, including local networking architectures, load balancing, and observability tooling.
- Experience evaluating and optimizing SAP BTP runtime sizing, service quotas, and integration behaviors on hyperscaler platforms.
- Experience implementing application performance monitoring (APM) and distributed tracing systems (e.g., Dynatrace, Grafana, Datadog, or AppDynamics).
- Professional certifications on major cloud platforms (e.g., Alibaba Cloud ACP/ACE, AWS Solutions Architect/Specialty, or SAP on Cloud).
- Experience with enterprise integration patterns and architectures, such as S/4HANA, OData services, Fiori, and Core Data Services (CDS).
- Experience applying AI and machine learning tools to automate performance test analysis, log synthesis, or anomaly detection workflows.
- Experience collaborating across cross-functional engineering teams within an Agile or Scrum delivery framework.