Senior Java Developer - Performance Engineering

What are we building?

Hard Rock Digital is a fiercely focused team working to become the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We're building a deeply curious team with a passion for learning, operating, and building new products and technologies for millions of consumers. We're customer-obsessed — we care about each customer interaction, experience, behavior, and insight, and strive to ensure we're always acting authentically.

Rooted in the kindred spirits of Hard Rock and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Hard Rock Digital taps a brand known the world over as the leader in gaming, entertainment, and hospitality. We're taking that foundation of success and bringing it to the digital space - ready to join us?

What’s the position?

We are looking for a Senior Java Developer to join our Performance Engineering team and take ownership of expanding our load testing capabilities. This role is both hands-on and hands-off-keyboard: you will be the primary developer standing up Gatling as a new addition to our load testing toolbox (which currently includes Locust and k6), while also serving as a technical mentor for the team, helping developers at every level, including senior engineers new to Java, grow their skills and adopt strong development practices.

This is a high-visibility role for someone who enjoys building tooling, solving performance problems, and multiplying their impact by levelling up the people around them.

Key Responsibilities

Load Testing & Tooling

• Own the Gatling rollout: Design, build, and productionize a Gatling-based load testing framework from the ground up, integrating it into our existing performance engineering toolbox alongside Locust and k6.

• Design and execute load tests: Build realistic load, stress, soak, and scalability test scenarios that reflect real-world traffic patterns and business-critical workflows.

• Analyze and report on performance: Interpret test results, identify bottlenecks (application, database, infrastructure), and work with engineering teams to resolve them.

• Build reusable frameworks: Develop maintainable, well-documented Gatling simulations and supporting utilities/libraries that other engineers can extend.

• Integrate with CI/CD: Automate load test execution and reporting as part of the deployment pipeline.

Mentorship & Engineering Practices

• Mentor engineers: Provide structured and informal mentorship to mid-level, junior, and senior engineers, including senior engineers from other language backgrounds, on Java fundamentals, idiomatic patterns, framework usage, and best practices.

• Champion best practices: Establish and evangelize coding standards, testing strategy, and performance-engineering best practices across teams.

• Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner with development, QA, DevOps/SRE, and architecture teams to embed performance testing earlier in the development lifecycle.

Success Measures

• Gatling is fully integrated into the performance engineering toolbox with documented frameworks/patterns other engineers can use independently.

• Mid, junior, and non-Java-background senior engineers show measurable growth in Java proficiency and testing practices as a result of your mentorship.

• Load testing is a standard, automated part of the release process rather than a manual afterthought.

What are we looking for?

• 5+ years of professional Java development experience, with deep knowledge of the language, JVM internals, and common frameworks (e.g., Spring/Spring Boot).

• Strong, demonstrable experience with load/performance testing concepts (throughput, latency, concurrency, ramp-up strategies, think time, correlation, etc.).

• Hands-on experience with Gatling (or very strong ability to quickly become the team's go-to Gatling expert). Scala DSL familiarity is a plus.

• Experience with at least one other load testing tool (e.g., Locust, k6, JMeter, LoadRunner) and the ability to compare trade-offs between tools.

• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines and integrating automated performance tests into them.

• Proven experience mentoring other engineers, comfortable explaining concepts clearly to people with widely varying experience levels, including non-Java engineers learning Java.

Skills & Competencies

• Strong communication skills; able to translate performance data into actionable recommendations for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with distributed systems, microservices, and cloud infrastructure (AWS and/or Cloudflare).

• Familiarity with APM/observability tooling (e.g., Datadog, New Relic, Grafana/Prometheus) to correlate load test results with system telemetry.

• Experience building internal developer tools or frameworks used by multiple teams.

• Background in relational/NoSQL databases and how they behave under load.

• Prior experience formally leading a tooling migration or adoption effort.

• Python development experience; our existing load testing toolbox includes Locust, so familiarity with Python-based test scenarios is a plus.

• JavaScript/TypeScript development experience; we also use k6, so comfort reading/writing JS-based test scripts is a plus.

What’s in it for you?

We offer our employees more than just competitive compensation. Our team benefits include:

• Competitive pay and benefits

• Flexible vacation allowance

• A hybrid / remote working environment

• Startup culture backed by a secure, global brand

Roster of Uniques

We care deeply about every interaction our customers have with us, and trust and empower our staff to own and drive their experience. Our vision for our business and customers is built on fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment where regardless of background or beliefs you feel able to be authentic and bring all your talent into play. We want to celebrate you being you (we are an equal opportunity employer).