Lead Performance Tester

About the Role

Define and lead the performance engineering strategy across high-availability, cloud-native telecom platforms

Lead, train, and coordinate a distributed guild of SDETs across multiple feature teams, guiding them to build, maintain, and execute performance scripts (k6) within their fractional sprint capacity

Design, develop, and evolve scalable backend performance frameworks using k6, Python, Java, or TypeScript, focusing entirely on APIs, databases, and infrastructure

Implement and manage production traffic replay strategies (e.g., GoReplay) and complex multi-tenant test data generation to accurately recreate realistic production contention and load profiles

Own and drive performance, load, stress, endurance, scalability, and resilience testing, including chaos engineering practices (e.g., using AWS Fault Injection Simulator)

Validate real-time communication systems, event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ), and high-throughput distributed systems under production-like conditions

Integrate performance testing into CI/CD pipelines, enabling continuous performance validation, shift-left practices, and automated PR blocking for latency degradation

Leverage observability tooling (Grafana, CloudWatch, Coralogix, VictoriaMetrics, PMM) to monitor, analyse, and troubleshoot system performance

Establish performance benchmarks, SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets aligned with business and system requirements

Collaborate with architecture and data teams to identify bottlenecks, validate database architectures (e.g., MySQL, Tungsten), and present evidence-based investment proposals

Analyse and optimise performance across both legacy monolith systems (requiring integrated load testing) and modern microservices architectures

Who you are

• Proven experience mentoring and coordinating testing efforts across large, distributed engineering teams (e.g., conducting code reviews, guiding SDETs through framework adoption, and managing cross-team test schedules)
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS cloud services (EC2, ECS, RDS, API Gateway) with a focus on scalability and performance optimisation
• Proven expertise in performance testing tools (specifically k6, along with JMeter or Gatling), including test design, execution, and analysis at scale
• Hands-on experience with production traffic shadowing or replay tools (such as GoReplay)
• Deep experience testing distributed systems, message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ), microservices architectures, and high-volume, low-latency APIs
• Solid backend programming and scripting skills in Python, Java, or TypeScript to build custom performance frameworks and tooling
• Strong understanding of system design, concurrency, throughput, latency, and fault tolerance principles
• Experience implementing performance testing within CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions) and enabling continuous performance feedback loops
• Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring tools (Grafana, Coralogix, PMM) for performance analysis and diagnostics
• Experience working within Agile environments and translating performance insights into actionable engineering outcomes
• Demonstrable hands-on experience in backend performance engineering and automation using Python, Java, or TypeScript
• Proven track record of performance, scalability, and resilience testing in AWS-based cloud-native systems
• Strong experience designing large-scale performance test strategies and leading QA/SDET teams to execute them
• Deep understanding of API performance testing, integration testing, and system-level non-functional validation
• Solid grasp of system architecture, distributed systems behaviour, and non-functional testing methodologies
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and log analysis tools
• Familiarity with RESTful APIs and event-driven systems

There’s no perfect candidate. You don't need all the preferred qualifications to make a valuable impact on our team. Our employees and customers come from diverse backgrounds, so if you're passionate about what you could achieve at [Employer hidden], we'd love to hear from you

Application Process

Application Requirements:

• Updated CV clearly demonstrating performance engineering leadership, cross-team coordination, AWS expertise, and backend automation frameworks
• Summary of performance testing frameworks, tools (e.g., k6, GoReplay), and CI/CD methodologies implemented
• Detailed examples of performance testing engagements (scale, environments, bottlenecks identified, business impact, improvements delivered)
• Evidence of driving performance strategy, mentoring QA/SDET teams, and influencing architecture