Performance Test Lead

Job Title: Senior Performance Test Engineer(FTE) Department: Quality Engineering Location: Cirencester, UK — Onsite minimum 3 days per week Reporting To: Head of Test / Delivery Manager Budget: 60-70K/year

1. Role Purpose We are seeking a hands-on Senior Performance Test Engineer to lead end-to-end non-functional testing, system profiling, and capacity planning for enterprise wealth management applications. This role goes beyond running test scripts; you will be responsible for defining technical performance strategies, conducting deep root-cause analysis on system bottlenecks (JVM, Database, Network, APM), and driving infrastructure scaling decisions alongside architects and developers.
2. Key Responsibilities

• Performance Strategy & Workload Modeling: Formulate end-to-end non-functional test strategies (Load, Stress, Spike, Soak/Endurance) from the ground up, establishing performance baselines and KPIs even when SLAs or user projections are ambiguous.
• Deep Root-Cause Analysis (RCA) & Profiling: Identify and debug server-side, application, and database bottlenecks. Perform JVM thread/heap dump analysis, monitor Garbage Collection (GC) behavior, analyze SQL query execution plans, and isolate latency sources.
• End-to-End Scripting (UI & API): Design, build, and optimize robust automated performance scripts covering both complex backend RESTful APIs and full front-end UI user journeys using JMeter, HP LoadRunner, Gatling, or k6.
• APM & Infrastructure Observability: Monitor application behavior under load using enterprise APM tools (Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, or AWS CloudWatch) to track CPU run queues, memory utilization, disk I/O, and network bottlenecks.
• Cloud Capacity Planning & Sizing: Collaborate with platform and cloud engineering teams to evaluate cloud resource allocation (AWS/Azure), pod auto-scaling limits, and hardware sizing based on test outputs.
• DevOps Pipeline Integration: Integrate automated performance test suites into CI/CD delivery pipelines (Azure DevOps, Jenkins, or GitLab) to enforce shift-left non-functional quality gates.
• Stakeholder Reporting: Translate technical performance metrics into clear executive summary reports, risk assessments, and actionable engineering recommendations for senior stakeholders.

3. Required Skills & Qualifications Must-Have Criteria:
4. Dedicated Performance Depth: 8–10+ years of continuous, hands-on experience exclusively in Performance Engineering and Non-Functional Quality Assurance (not functional, manual, or UI test automation).
5. Full-Stack Execution: Equal proficiency in both UI end-to-end performance scripting and API load testing.
6. Core Tooling Expertise: Expert-level scripting and framework development in Apache JMeter, HP LoadRunner / Performance Center, or Gatling.
7. Hands-on Root-Cause Diagnostics: Proven capability in analyzing JVM heap/thread dumps, GC logs, and database execution plans / SQL query optimizations.
8. APM Tooling: Direct experience setting up and interpreting telemetry in Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Datadog, or AWS CloudWatch.
9. Pipeline Automation: Hands-on experience embedding performance test executions into CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps / Jenkins).
10. Client Alignment: Strong client-facing communication skills to articulate technical bottlenecks and strategy to project leads and client stakeholders. Nice-to-Have Criteria:

• Domain exposure in Financial Services, Wealth Management, or Banking.
• Familiarity with Salesforce / CRM platform performance testing.
• Experience with Chaos Engineering or AI-assisted testing tools.
• Location proximity to Cirencester / Swindon / Bristol (willingness to be onsite 3 days per week).