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The differences between senior performance engineers and performance engineers can be seen in a few details. Each job has different responsibilities and duties. It typically takes 2-4 years to become both a senior performance engineer and a performance engineer. Additionally, a senior performance engineer has an average salary of $110,382, which is higher than the $101,647 average annual salary of a performance engineer.
The top three skills for a senior performance engineer include java, jmeter and linux. The most important skills for a performance engineer are java, linux, and performance issues.
| Senior Performance Engineer | Performance Engineer | |
| Yearly salary | $110,382 | $101,647 |
| Hourly rate | $53.07 | $48.87 |
| Growth rate | 11% | 11% |
| Number of jobs | 95,530 | 95,652 |
| Job satisfaction | - | - |
| Most common degree | Bachelor's Degree, 66% | Bachelor's Degree, 68% |
| Average age | 44 | 44 |
| Years of experience | 4 | 4 |
Senior Performance Engineers are responsible for optimizing production systems to support traffic growth and new products. Their duties include creating a best practice framework for performance monitoring, scalability, and dependency handling, as well as developing testing infrastructure for post-deployment of production. They are responsible for designing alerts and dashboards, addressing performance issues, conducting root-cause analysis, defining process architecture, and facilitating site reliability in determining requirements for product scalability. Senior Performance Engineers also develop training programs to mentor operation services personnel.
A Performance Engineer validates system stability and its performance by carrying out load tests. They analyze test outcomes and work diligently with different engineers and developers to deliver excellent bug fix results. These professionals improve system capacity, scalability, reliability, and performance by offering technical assistance. Besides undertaking root cause evaluation of the system's performance problems and giving corrective actions, a performance engineer also recommends system improvements after evaluating the system performance. Also, they oversee the performance lifecycle and then recommend the right improvements.
Senior performance engineers and performance engineers have different pay scales, as shown below.
| Senior Performance Engineer | Performance Engineer | |
| Average salary | $110,382 | $101,647 |
| Salary range | Between $83,000 And $146,000 | Between $76,000 And $134,000 |
| Highest paying City | San Mateo, CA | San Francisco, CA |
| Highest paying state | California | California |
| Best paying company | Netflix | Meta |
| Best paying industry | Technology | Start-up |
There are a few differences between a senior performance engineer and a performance engineer in terms of educational background:
| Senior Performance Engineer | Performance Engineer | |
| Most common degree | Bachelor's Degree, 66% | Bachelor's Degree, 68% |
| Most common major | Computer Science | Computer Science |
| Most common college | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Georgia Institute of Technology |
Here are the differences between senior performance engineers' and performance engineers' demographics:
| Senior Performance Engineer | Performance Engineer | |
| Average age | 44 | 44 |
| Gender ratio | Male, 76.2% Female, 23.8% | Male, 83.4% Female, 16.6% |
| Race ratio | Black or African American, 6.2% Unknown, 4.7% Hispanic or Latino, 8.8% Asian, 12.0% White, 67.7% American Indian and Alaska Native, 0.5% | Black or African American, 6.2% Unknown, 4.7% Hispanic or Latino, 8.8% Asian, 12.0% White, 67.7% American Indian and Alaska Native, 0.5% |
| LGBT Percentage | 11% | 11% |