Lead QA Engineer, Performance

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United Kingdom.

📋 Description

• Define and take ownership of the organization-wide strategy for performance testing and engineering.

• Establish standards for:

• Approaches to performance testing

• Workload modeling

• Capacity planning

• Introduce and expand performance engineering practices across multiple delivery teams.

• Offer technical leadership and mentorship to QA and engineering teams regarding performance best practices.

• Align performance objectives with business SLAs, SLOs, and user experience expectations.

• Design and develop scalable performance testing frameworks and automation pipelines.

• Drive the adoption of tools such as:

• Gatling, JMeter, k6, Locust, or similar

• Create reusable solutions for:

• Load testing

• Stress testing

• Spike testing

• Soak testing

• Integrate performance testing within CI/CD pipelines for continuous validation.

• Ensure that performance tests are repeatable, reliable, and representative of production environments.

• Define realistic user workload models based on production data and usage patterns.

• Design performance test scenarios that reflect:

• Peak load

• Concurrent users

• Throughput and latency requirements

• Apply risk-based prioritization for performance testing.

• Ensure coverage across:

• APIs

• Microservices

• Data pipelines

• Event-driven systems

• Lead performance validation for:

• Microservices architectures

• Event-driven systems (Kafka)

• High-throughput APIs

• Analyze latency, throughput, error rates, and bottlenecks across distributed systems.

• Validate system behavior under failure conditions and in degraded environments.

• Ensure that horizontal scalability and resilience strategies are thoroughly tested.

• Validate performance across:

• AWS cloud environments

• Containerized platforms (Docker, Kubernetes)

• Conduct capacity planning and infrastructure benchmarking.

• Ensure systems scale efficiently through:

• Auto-scaling

• Load balancing

• Distributed architectures

• Evaluate the performance of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) deployments.

• Utilize observability tools to analyze system performance, including:

• Metrics (Prometheus, Datadog)

• Logs (ELK)

• Traces (distributed tracing tools)

• Identify and diagnose:

• CPU, memory, and I/O bottlenecks

• Network latency challenges

• Database performance limitations

• Collaborate with engineering teams to enhance system performance and architecture.

• Define and enforce performance SLAs, SLOs, and acceptance criteria.

• Establish quality gates for performance within CI/CD pipelines.

• Ensure that performance requirements are validated prior to production release.

• Promote the adoption of performance testing standards across teams.

• Support audit, compliance, and regulatory requirements in performance-critical systems.

• Analyze actual production performance data to refine testing strategies.

• Lead investigations and root cause analyses for performance-related incidents.

• Establish feedback loops between production observability and testing environments.

• Drive enhancements in:

• System responsiveness

• Stability under load

• Operational resilience.

• Define and monitor performance KPIs, including:

• Response times

• Throughput

• Error rates

• Resource utilization.

• Create performance dashboards and reporting frameworks.

• Initiate continuous optimization initiatives based on performance data.

• Align performance metrics with business outcomes and user experience.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience as a Performance Test Lead / Performance Engineer / SDET.

• Strong experience in defining performance testing strategies and frameworks.

• Hands-on expertise with contemporary performance testing tools.

• In-depth understanding of:

• Scalability and performance of distributed systems

• Cloud-native architectures

• Experience in integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines.

• Strong skills in:

• Performance analysis and identification of bottlenecks

• Root cause analysis and optimization of systems

• Experience in defining and tracking performance SLAs/SLOs and KPIs.

• Ability to lead and influence quality improvements across teams.

🏝️ Benefits

• 25 days of holiday plus bank holidays.

• Company-paid medical insurance.

• Life assurance.

• Pension scheme.

• Annual training allowance.

• Wellbeing allowance.

• Virtual GP.

• Employee Assistance plan and more.