Steve Leggett

About Steve Leggett

I help teams understand where performance actually breaks down before they commit to rewrites, new tooling, or additional capacity.In staff and principal roles, this work did not stop at analysis. I partnered with teams to carry changes through design, implementation, and validation, often across multiple services and stakeholder groups. The readout was the starting point, not the hand-off.Most of the work I do starts with one slow or fragile workflow. Something that feels off, generates debate, or quietly costs time and money, but has never been traced end to end.My focus is short, fixed-scope performance readouts. The goal is not to tune everything or boil the ocean. It is to identify the dominant constraint, document where time is going, and make it clear whether further work is worth doing.This approach has been shaped by over 15 years working on production systems across SaaS and enterprise environments, including Guild Education, Aptos, and Henry Schein. I have led performance investigations across APIs, distributed services, data stores, and client-facing applications where small bottlenecks had outsized impact.I work best with engineering leaders and platform owners who need clarity before making a larger investment. This work is designed to reduce uncertainty, not create another roadmap.More on how I approach this work is at steveleggett.dev.Based in Atlanta. Currently taking on a small number of focused performance readouts.

Experience

1. Staff Performance Engineer Grpc Kafka K6 Net Ci Cd Cloud Infra Observability

   Henry Schein One

   Aug 2024 — Present · Atlanta, GA, US

   Designing and scaling performance frameworks for distributed client/server and cloud systems across Henry Schein’s flagship dental platform. Focused on deep-dive profiling, load simulation, and system-level optimization across gRPC, Kafka, and legacy.NET infrastructure.Key Contributions: 🟢 Built a Dockerized K6-based performance framework, integrated with GitLab CI/CD for automated benchmarking. 🟢 Diagnosed startup and UI slowness using DotTrace, WPR, and system metrics (CPU, memory, interrupts). 🟢 Ran Docker-based K6 tests and instrumented performance scenarios to identify and quantify improvements across UI and backend workflows, including FlaUI-driven automation. 🟢 Partnered with DevOps and QA to define thread pools, failover behavior, and resource thresholds for high concurrency. 🟢 Instrumented workflows and regression points for ongoing optimization in legacy.NET systems.

Education

• Mississippi State University

  Bachelors of Science in Independent Studies, Business and Technology (IT)

  2006 — 2010

• Argosy University

  Master of Business Administration - MBA, Business Administration and Management, General

  2016 — 2018

• Mississippi State University

  Bachelor of Science - BS, Multi/Interdisciplinary Studies

Skills

• Sql Server
• Agile Methodologies
• Management
• Software Development Life Cycle (Sdlc)
• Qtp
• Automation
• Defect Tracking
• Microservices
• Hp Quality Center
• User Acceptance Testing
• Software Quality Assurance
• Oracle
• Requirements Analysis
• Regression Testing
• Application Lifecycle Management
• Performance Monitoring
• Integration
• Manual Testing
• Splunk
• Databases
• Strategy
• Sitescope
• System Testing
• Web Applications
• Hp Qtp
• Test Strategy
• Enterprise Software
• Leadership
• Performance Center
• Business Analysis
• Quality Assurance
• Performance Testing
• IT Service Management
• Test Planning
• Test Cases
• Testing
• Project Management
• Test Automation
• Loadrunner
• Software Documentation