Staff Software Engineer I - Performance Engineer, JMeter, Gatling & Taurus

Scope:

• Seeking an exceptional performance engineer with 10-14 years of relevant experience, a deep technical expertise and proven leadership capabilities.
• This senior technical leader will mentor team members, drive performance execution decisions, contribute to the team roadmap, and work closely with the broader engineering team across the full development and deployment lifecycle, apply proven performance engineering best practices, and drive their execution in partnership with both platform and product teams.

Our current technical environment:

• Software: Java (enterprise)/Scala, JMeter, Gatling, Taurus, BlazeMeter, Appium/Selenium, Elastic/Kibana, SSMS, IntelliJ/VS Code, Linux, Jira, Git, GitHub
• Cloud Architecture: Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes, Docker
• Frameworks/Others: JVM, SQL & NoSQL databases, KQL (Kibana Query Language), CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions)

What you’ll do:

• Lead performance architecture and test execution activities for existing and new products in the Cognitive Execution portfolio.
• Design, modify, and optimize performance tests using J-Meter, Gatling or similar tools (Intermediate to Expert level).
• Create comprehensive performance test strategies, test plans, workload models, and execution frameworks for complex distributed systems.
• Identify root causes of performance issues, guide development teams to fix those rather than their symptoms.
• Execute and oversee performance, load, and benchmark tests; provide timely analysis and status reporting during active release cycles.
• Publish comprehensive performance test reports and communicate findings to DevOps and development teams for triage and resolution.
• Support team management in prioritizing backlog items.
• Translate business requirements to user stories and actively seek feedback from stakeholders.
• Participate in team activities such as backlog grooming, planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives.
• Make impediments transparent and help others to overcome theirs.
• Timely and proactively communicate impediments to commitments.
• Mentor and empower junior team members by sharing knowledge and providing guidance so they develop their own solutions.
• Push the team towards better quality software by constructively pointing out opportunities to reduce complexity and write cleaner code and more effective tests.
• Participate in team hiring activities.

What we are looking for:

• Bachelor’s degree in STEM (or equivalent practical experience).
• 10-14 years of relevant experience in software performance engineering with a proven track record of technical leadership and mentorship.
• Expert-level performance engineering execution experience with demonstrated ability to lead performance initiatives.
• Demonstrated leadership in pushing teams towards better quality software and helping team members develop simpler, more robust test designs.
• JMeter, Gatling, Taurus, or similar load/performance testing tools: Intermediate to Expert.
  • Design, modify, and maintain complex performance test scripts.
  • Experience with BlazeMeter (or similar) as an execution/orchestration platform for test runs and result analysis.
• Java code comprehension for performance analysis: Intermediate.
  • Create performance test scenarios aligned to application behavior.
  • Understand why specific code patterns can cause performance issues.
• Appium/Selenium for UI performance testing.
• SQL and database performance tuning: Intermediate to Expert.
  • Prevent slow queries and optimise SQL for faster execution.
  • Identify bottlenecks, including locking/contention.
  • Recommend query improvements and indexing strategies.
  • Strong fundamentals in query complexity analysis, transactions, locking behaviour, and execution plan analysis
  • Diagnose root causes and improve query performance.
• SQL and NoSQL database concepts: Strong knowledge.
  • Understanding of different database and datastore technologies (SQL and NoSQL).
  • Evaluate pluses and minuses of each technology.
  • Understand use cases when to use one vs other with implementation examples.
• JVM fundamentals: Intermediate.
  • Memory leaks: what they are and how to troubleshoot.
  • Garbage collection (GC) impact on latency and throughput.
  • Optimize JVM configurations for improved application performance.
  • Conduct heap dump analysis and performance profiling.
• Observability and monitoring tools: Intermediate (hands-on).
  • Practical experi…