Aker Systems - Lead QA Engineer - Performance

Remote - Home Based, UK1w ago

Requirements

• Essential • 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 • Scalability and distributed system performance • Cloud-native architectures • Experience integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines • 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 • Desirable • Experience in high-scale or regulated environments • Chaos engineering • Resilience and fault injection testing • Experience with capacity planning and cost optimisation • Knowledge of security-performance interactions (e.g., encryption overhead) • Personal Attributes • Personal Attributes • Strong systems thinking and analytical mindset • Ability to translate performance data into practical engineering improvements • Influential leader across engineering and product teams • Proactive and outcome-driven • Strong communication and stakeholder management skills • Aker Systems Attributes • At Aker we work as a team; we are collaborative, hardworking, open, and delivery obsessed. There is no blame culture here: try things, and take responsibility for the outcomes. You are always part of the wider Aker. We help our colleagues and take pride in successfully achieving difficult tasks. We run towards problems and help to solve them. Communicate always, do so accurately and in a timely fashion. • In return, we offer a competitive salary, 25 days holiday plus bank holidays, company paid medical insurance and life assurance, pension scheme, annual training allowance, wellbeing allowance, virtual GP, Employee Assistance plan and more. • Equal Opportunities • Aker Systems fosters a diverse environment that encourages openness in its communications and is committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, age, marital status, national origin, citizenship status, disability, veteran status or other personal characteristics. We embrace differences of opinion and diversity because they help challenge us and find new groundbreaking technical solutions.

Responsibilities

• 1. Performance Engineering Strategy & Leadership • Define and own the organisation-wide performance testing and engineering strategy. • 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. • 2. Performance Test Architecture & Automation • Design and implement scalable performance test frameworks and automation pipelines. • Gatling, JMeter, k6, Locust or similar • Integrate performance testing into CI/CD pipelines for continuous validation. • Ensure performance tests are repeatable, reliable, and production-representative. • 3. Workload Modelling & Test Design • Define realistic user workload models based on production data and usage patterns. • Concurrent users • Throughput and latency requirements • Event-driven systems • 4. Backend, API & Distributed System Performance • 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. • 5. Cloud, Infrastructure & Scalability Testing • AWS cloud environments • Containerised platforms (Docker, Kubernetes) • Conduct capacity planning and infrastructure benchmarking. • Distributed architectures • Evaluate performance of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) deployments. • 6. Observability, Analysis & Bottleneck Resolution • Metrics (Prometheus, Datadog) • Traces (distributed tracing tools) • CPU, memory, I/O bottlenecks • Network latency issues • Database performance constraints • Collaborate with engineering teams to optimise system performance and architecture. • 7. Non-Functional Quality Governance • 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. • 8. Production Performance & Continuous Improvement • 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. • System responsiveness • Stability under load • Operational resilience • 9. Metrics, Reporting & Optimisation • 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. • Technology EnvironmentPerformance Testing Tools • Technology Environment • Performance Testing Tools • Gatling, k6, JMeter, Locust (or similar) • Languages • Java, Kotlin, Python, or JavaScript • Architecture • Microservices, Event-driven systems, Kafka • Cloud & Infrastructure • AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform • CI/CD • GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins • Observability • Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, Distributed Tracing