Senior Performance Test Engineer at Cellulant Corporation

JOB DESCRIPTION

• We are seeking a talented and experienced Senior Performance Test Engineer to join our dynamic team. In this role, you will play a vital part in our software development life cycle by utilizing your expertise to ensure the optimal performance of our software applications. As a key contributor, you will collaborate with a diverse group of engineers and business experts, enabling you to make a significant impact on the quality and performance of our products.
• Your extensive experience and technical expertise will be crucial in ensuring the high performance, scalability, and reliability of our software applications. You will have the opportunity to work closely with talented engineers and business experts, collaborating on innovative solutions and driving continuous improvement in our performance testing processes.
• You will work closely with Software Engineers, DevOps, and Product Managers within existing product teams to deliver high-quality software releases.

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES

• Develop new performance tests for our core products, Backend APIs and services, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Perform application performance profiling with tools like VisualVM, Newrelic’s Thread profiler, etc.
• Offer recommendations on performance improvement areas on different applications.
• Provisioning and maintenance of performance test environment.
• Collaborate with product and development teams to understand how new features should be tested and to contribute to performance tests for these new features.
• Collaborate with engineers to define and implement mechanisms to inject testing earlier into the software development process.
• Identify, Share, and nurture the adoption of best practices in code health, testing, testability, and maintainability in collaboration with the wider Quality Engineering department. You should champion clean code and the concept of the test pyramid.
• Analyzing complex software systems and collaborating with others to improve the overall design, testability, and quality.
• Striving for the fastest feedback possible. Test parallelization should be a top priority. You see distributed systems as a core challenge of good test automation infrastructure.
• Configuring performance tests to execute reliably and efficiently in CI/CD environments.
• Tracking and communicating test results in a timely, effective, and automated manner.

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE

Must-have experience:

• Experience with K6, Jmeter, Load Runner, or Soap UI. 
• Working knowledge of RabbitMQ/Kafka and any other messaging queuing systems.
• Working experience with Jira and Git.
• Working knowledge of Newrelic, Grafana and any other monitoring tool.
• Experience in Linux operating systems.
• Excellent in the deep analysis of applications to identify performance bottlenecks.
• Excellent organization and time management skills and ability to work independently with minimal supervision.
• Must be able to work in a fast-paced environment and manage priorities and multi-task.
• Exceptional Communication skills.
• Demonstrate excellent documentation skills and an aptitude to clearly communicate findings and results.
• Ability to effectively prioritize and deliver work in a high-pressure environment.
• Show full commitment to continuous improvement of processes and deliverables.
• Demonstrate a high degree of literacy, numeracy, and accuracy.
• Possess good problem-solving skills.
• Proactive, highly motivated, and a strong team player with a positive attitude.
• Working Knowledge of microservices.

Experience that will count in your favor: 

• Test Framework Development: Experience in developing or enhancing test frameworks and libraries can be highly valuable.
• Security Testing: Knowledge and hands-on experience in security testing, including identifying vulnerabilities, conducting penetration testing, or working with tools like OWASP ZAP or Burp Suite, would be an asset.
• Test-Driven Development (TDD): Familiarity with Test-Driven Development principles and experience in practicing TDD can be advantageous.
• Cloud and Distributed Systems Testing: Experience in testing applications deployed on cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and understanding the challenges of testing distributed systems would be valuable.
• Continuous Testing: Hands-on experience with continuous testing practices and tools would be a plus.
• Agile/Scrum Methodologies: Familiarity with Agile development methodologies, particularly Scrum, would be beneficial.
• Leadership and Mentoring: Candidates who have demonstrated leadership skills, such as leading testing initiatives, mentoring junior team members, or acting as a subject matter expert, would be valuable. 

Nice to have experience:

• Test Data Management: Experience in managing test data effectively, including designing and implementing strategies for generating and maintaining test data sets. This includes knowledge of data masking, data privacy regulations, and techniques for creating representative and realistic test data.
• Test Environment Management: Familiarity with managing test environments, including setting up and configuring test environments to closely mirror production environments. 
• Test Reporting and Metrics: Experience in designing and implementing comprehensive test reporting mechanisms and metrics to track test progress, coverage, and quality. 
• Exploratory Testing: Knowledge and experience in conducting exploratory testing, which involves simultaneous learning, test design, and execution. 
• Test Automation Infrastructure: Experience in designing and building scalable and robust test automation infrastructure, including distributed test execution environments and cloud-based testing solutions. 
• Test Process Improvement: Candidates with experience in driving continuous improvement initiatives within the testing process would be desirable.
• Test Data Analysis and Insights: Proficiency in analyzing test results, identifying patterns, and extracting actionable insights.
• Test Strategy and Planning: Experience in defining test strategies and test plans based on project requirements, risk analysis, and industry best practices. 

Qualifications:

• At least 3 – 5 years of Performance Testing experience.
• Qualified to ISEB/ISTQB Foundation Level or better.
• Experience and working knowledge of programming languages Java, Go, Javascript, SQL, or Python.
• You’ve got a working knowledge of Docker.
• You’re interested in growing your knowledge and skills in Test Environment Provisioning and Configuring using technologies like Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, GCP, or AWS.
• You have experience with Continuous Integration systems (e.g. Jenkins, Travis, GitLab).

KEY COMPETENCIES & SKILLS

Quality Planning & Test Coverage

• Help create test strategies on performance testing and implement new and existing features/applications.
• Identifies gaps in non-functional testing, document missing coverage, and add new test automation to improve coverage.

Test Stability & Triage

• Participate in test pipeline on-call rotation and ensure that pipeline failures are triaged, addressed, and communicated in a timely manner.
• Help un-quarantine flaky performance tests.
• Work with the counterpart group to address performance test failures due to application performance issues.
• Perform application performance profiling with tools like VisualVM, new relic Thread profiler, etc.
• Offer recommendations on performance improvement areas on different applications.

Test Tooling

• Contribute to test stability in production and non-production environments.
• Contribute to new test framework tooling and provide feedback on new approaches proposed by the team.
• Improve deploy processes, and deployment scripts, and build pipelines in collaboration with other Software Engineers in Test.

Test Environments

• Take ownership of performance test environment provisioning and maintenance.
• Grow your knowledge of provisioning and setup tools like Omnibus, the Orchestrator, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, Helm Charts, GCP, or AWS.

Task Management & OKRs

• Owns tasks within an OKR.
• Regularly manage project schedules ensuring objectives are aligned with team/department goals.
• Exercises judgment and independently identifies the next steps.

Knowledge Sharing

• Clearly document processes and knowledge in collaboration with other team members.
• Domain-specific expertise.
• Demonstrate domain-specific responsibilities within their assigned product group.