Lead QA Engineer, Performance

Role Overview

• Define and own the organisation-wide performance testing and engineering strategy.
• Establish standards for:
• Performance testing approaches
• Workload modelling
• Capacity planning
• Introduce and scale performance engineering practices across multiple delivery teams.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring to QA and engineering teams on performance best practices.
• Align performance goals with business SLAs, SLOs, and user experience expectations.
• Design and implement scalable performance test frameworks and automation pipelines.
• Lead adoption of tools such as:
• Gatling, JMeter, k6, Locust or similar
• Build reusable solutions for:
• Load testing
• Stress testing
• Spike testing
• Soak testing
• Integrate performance testing into CI/CD pipelines for continuous validation.
• Ensure performance tests are repeatable, reliable, and production-representative.
• Define realistic user workload models based on production data and usage patterns.
• Design performance test scenarios reflecting:
• Peak load
• Concurrent users
• Throughput and latency requirements
• Apply risk-based prioritisation 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
• Analyse latency, throughput, error rates, and bottlenecks across distributed systems.
• Validate system behaviour under failure conditions and degraded environments.
• Ensure horizontal scalability and resilience strategies are tested.
• Validate performance across:
• AWS cloud environments
• Containerised platforms (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Conduct capacity planning and infrastructure benchmarking.
• Ensure systems scale efficiently using:
• Auto-scaling
• Load balancing
• Distributed architectures
• Evaluate performance of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) deployments.
• Use observability tools to analyse system performance, including:
• Metrics (Prometheus, Datadog)
• Logs (ELK)
• Traces (distributed tracing tools)
• Identify and diagnose:
• CPU, memory, I/O bottlenecks
• Network latency issues
• Database performance constraints
• Collaborate with engineering teams to optimise system performance and architecture.
• Define and enforce performance SLAs, SLOs, and acceptance criteria.
• Establish quality gates for performance within CI/CD pipelines.
• Ensure performance requirements are validated before production release.
• Drive adoption of performance testing standards across teams.
• Support audit, compliance, and regulatory expectations in performance-critical systems.
• Analyse real production performance data to refine testing strategies.
• Lead performance-related incident investigations and RCA activities.
• Establish feedback loops between production observability and test environments.
• Drive improvements in:
• System responsiveness
• Stability under load
• Operational resilience.
• Define and track performance KPIs, including:
• Response times
• Throughput
• Error rates
• Resource utilisation.
• Build performance dashboards and reporting frameworks.
• Drive continuous optimisation 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 defining performance testing strategies and frameworks
• Hands-on expertise with modern performance testing tools
• Deep understanding of:
• Scalability and distributed system performance
• Cloud-native architectures
• Experience integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines
• Strong skills in:
• Performance analysis and bottleneck identification
• Root cause analysis and system optimisation
• Experience defining and tracking performance SLAs/SLOs and KPIs
• Ability to lead and influence cross-team quality improvements.

Tech Stack

• AWS
• Cloud
• Distributed Systems
• Docker
• JMeter
• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• Microservices
• Prometheus
• Terraform

Benefits

• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Company paid medical insurance
• Life assurance
• Pension scheme
• Annual training allowance
• Wellbeing allowance
• Virtual GP
• Employee Assistance plan and more.