Job Title: Senior Performance Test Engineer

Department: Quality Engineering

Location: Cirencester, UK — Onsite minimum 3 days per week

Reporting To: Head of Test / Delivery Manager

Role Purpose

We are seeking an experienced and hands-on Senior Performance Test Engineer to drive non-functional testing across core wealth management and enterprise platforms. In this role, you will be responsible for designing, developing, and executing end-to-end performance test strategies, identifying system bottlenecks, and ensuring high application availability, scalability, and resilience under peak loads.

Key Responsibilities

• Performance Strategy & Execution: Define, design, and execute comprehensive non-functional test plans, including Load, Stress, Spike, Endurance, and Scalability testing across web applications, microservices, and API architectures.
• Performance Remediation: Own performance fixes with engineering teams, including JVM tuning, query/index optimization, thread/heap/GC analysis.
• Architecture Input: Influence system design for scalability during design reviews, rather than limiting performance validation to post-build testing.
• Capacity Planning: Drive cloud scalability and capacity decisions, including auto-scaling and resource sizing, based on performance test outcomes.
• Production Ownership: Support production performance monitoring and incident Root Cause Analysis (RCA).
• Scripting & Framework Development: Build, maintain, and optimize robust automated performance test scripts using Apache JMeter, BlazeMeter, HP LoadRunner, or k6.
• APM & Bottleneck Identification: Monitor and analyze server-side, database, and application metrics during test runs using APM tools such as AppDynamics, New Relic, AWS CloudWatch, or Dynatrace to isolate performance bottlenecks and degradation.
• CI/CD Integration: Integrate automated performance test suites into DevOps continuous deployment pipelines using Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or GitLab to enable early shift-left performance testing.
• AI & Modern Automation: Utilize AI-assisted testing tools, including Microsoft 365 Copilot and Generative AI, to accelerate test script generation, log analysis, and performance reporting.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Solution Architects, DevOps Engineers, and client stakeholders to translate non-functional requirements (NFRs) into measurable performance KPIs.
• Reporting & Defect Management: Produce clear, actionable performance evaluation reports, document non-functional defects, and recommend tuning/remediation strategies to engineering teams.