Position: Senior Performance Engineer/Architect (Capacity) <Ref Code: 101712-IO45E-BRABER>

Location: Washington DC

Duration: 6+ month contract

Description:

Seeking a Senior Performance Engineer/Architect to analyze, design and engineer high performing Customer products. The candidate should have extensive experience in infrastructure, architecture and operations support functions in a fast-paced, time-to-market-driven environment. Demonstrated experience in the following is strongly preferred: performance diagnostics, performance architecture design, performance tuning, performance monitoring, capacity planning, and/or software development in a multi-tier environment for midrange and mainframe platforms.

Tasks:
Analyzes the design and implementation of business applications, middleware, database, operating system, and hardware components and ensure that all system components are designed and tuned to acceptable levels of performance and resource utilization
Participates in technical architecture and design discussions to determine the most appropriate solution model taking into consideration high performance, availability, failover and disaster recovery
Partner with the Development, Application & Infrastructure Architecture and Technical Services teams to ensure that changes in technical or business systems do not adversely impact application performance
Ensures that capacity workload modeling and availability analysis is performed for a variety of platforms and environments
Serves as a technical expert to IT groups in planning the resource requirements for systems under development. Presents statistical availability and trend analysis and recommendations to IT management, IT leadership, and the business, as needed.
Serves as a technical expert resolving critical and complex application performance issues. Identifies and drives optimization changes in the application design to improve customer experience for mission/business critical IT applications
Develops, maintains, recommends, documents and supports tools and backend utilities to perform performance and capacity planning management
Creates and presents a Performance Planning Strategy that outlines Current Production Workload distribution, Performance Requirements and Test/Production Environment Requirements and Performance Optimization results
Performs the following Communication tasks
o Liaise with project stakeholders on an ongoing basis
o Lead, facilitate and participate in various meetings
o Ensure effective communication within and outside of the project team
o Report status to Resource Manager on a regular basis
o Assist Resource Manager in preparing and reporting statuses to Sr. Management and other Project Stakeholders

Required Skills/Qualifications:
Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Business, or Engineering or equivalent work experience required.
# 1 must have: Senior level understanding of modern application architecture and development
# 1 must have: Direct hands-on experience with performance diagnostics, performance architecture design, performance tuning, performance monitoring, capacity planning, and/or software development in a n-tier environment
# 2 must have: Demonstrated experience in monitoring, analyzing and recommending solutions to performance problems in high-traffic, large-scale distributed systems and client-server architectures
Ability to distill volumes of data, analyze performance results, and diagnose performance and capacity problems.
Knowledge of and experience in IT environment (mainframe, infrastructure, Web/Java)
Excellent analytical skills in order to effectively analyze broadly defined practices and policies in selecting methods, techniques, and evaluation criteria to obtain the desired results.
Ability to effectively adapt to rapidly changing technology and apply it to business needs, developing and delivering IT centric projects using (where appropriate) leading-edge technology.
Very good understanding of networking and architectural frameworks and methodologies, a working knowledge of design and implementation of systems software as well as the internals of the system in order to produce the best possible system availability and performance.
Excellent knowledge of MS Office 2010 tool set MS Word, MS Excel, MS Project, MS Visio and MS PowerPoint.
Solid teamwork and interpersonal skills, with the ability to communicate and persuade customers, employees, and management at all levels and thrive in a cross-functional environment.
Excellent oral and written communications; an ability to present (5%) and discuss technical information in a way that establishes rapport, persuades others, and gains understanding.
Ability to work independently, manage multiple tasks and work under pressure
Ability to provide structure in an unstructured and rapidly changing environment

Preferred Skills/Qualifications
# 1 Preferred: Progressive broad-based Information Systems Management experience (which could include consulting) with state-of-the-art hardware and software systems is desirable; knowledge and implementation experience in new computing architectures and networked computing structures.
# 2 Preferred: Performance/Capacity modeling will be a plus.
Health Care Industry experience will be a plus.