Principal Quality Engineer - Performance

The Challenge:

• Is a professional with advanced expertise in the field of performance engineering who typically involves working closely with software development teams to assess, analyze, and optimize the performance of applications and systems.
• In this hands-on position, the primary responsibility is to create performance scripts aimed at enhancing the long-term scalability and stability of the product. The role involves close collaboration with the product team to gain a deep understanding of the evolving functionality and the creation of robust automation and performance scripts that align with the acceptance criteria.
• As the individual gains a deeper comprehension of the breadth and depth of product functionality, they are expected to apply critical thinking and pose "what if" questions to enhance the strength of the tests.
• The position focuses on continually enhancing automated testing effectiveness, assessing opportunities for improvement.
• This role is attuned to customer use cases and production usage patterns, gradually incorporating the appropriate tests into the release pipeline.
• The role also involves grasping dependency models and making informed decisions to conduct intelligent testing.
• An integral aspect of this role is embracing a DevOps mindset, fostering rapid deployments, and serving as an anchor for the product scrum team to ensure the delivery of high-quality outcomes.
• Has the capability to innovate and find engineering solutions to the challenges of tomorrow.

Your Mission:

• Play a critical role in ensuring the optimal performance and reliability of our company's products and services.
• Lead and guide a team of performance engineers, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and implement strategies to identify, analyze, and address performance bottlenecks and issues. Your expertise will be instrumental in enhancing our system's efficiency, scalability, and user experience.
• Enhance performance efficiency by automating tests that hold priority within the team.
• Implement a "shift-left" approach by automating tests at appropriate stages to provide early feedback to developers.
• Prioritize building a robust test framework to minimize testing time and facilitate rapid feedback.
• Identify and troubleshoot issues stemming from scripts, environments, or the product, and promptly report relevant defects.
• Maintain a continuous improvement cycle to ensure that test scripts remain both portable and scalable.
• Ensure the reliability and vitality of automated tests, allowing teams to rely on these test results.
• Eliminate noisy and irrelevant tests by deprecating them.
• Vigilantly pursue continuous improvement and seize every opportunity to introduce the appropriate levels of automation.
• Investigate system health and resource utilization to provide recommendations for scaling when necessary.
• Continuously explore the adoption of modern technologies.
• Engage in daily scrum meetings, sprint retrospectives, and sprint demos.
• Comprehend and translate both business and technical requirements into diverse types of performance tests.
• Continuously collaborate with product teams to experiment and reinforce product Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Collaborate with product management and other functional teams to take ownership of and deliver performance/load test plans.
• Execute and maintain the automation test suite.
• Assess build quality by scrutinizing test results from build acceptance tests in frequently deployed environments, multiple times per day.
• Define test data and reports for both functional and non-functional requirements.
• Identify defects during the evaluation process and collaborate with development teams to resolve them.
• Collaborate with various teams to grasp newly delivered components in the pipeline and devise innovative performance tests.
• Participate in various Proof of Concepts (POCs) to keep the automation framework and technology in sync with the current product offerings.
• Incorporate, maintain, and update scripts in the existing automation suite, assisting in its execution across multiple checkpoints in the release cycle.
• Adhere to best practices and coding standards.
• Act as a mentor for less experienced team members.
• Provide support for generating reports and visuals in the release pipeline.
• Stay up to date on contemporary software development best practices, emerging technologies, and design patterns, contributing to thought leadership initiatives.
• Analyze the performance of environments and troubleshoot to identify problematic areas.
• Develop robust tests to support sizing requirements, collaborating closely with development and operations teams to experiment and optimize environment sizing.
• Conduct system performance testing to ensure system reliability, capacity, and scalability.
• Generate test summary reports for management review.
• Leverage strong communication skills and innate curiosity to provide trusted and highly valuable feedback.

You Are:

• Is a quick self-guided, independent learner. Does not depend on the mentor/buddy/manager for repeated sessions. Does enough homework before asking necessary questions.
• Is productive within a month of joining the company. The team is aware of this individual and begins to include them for more work. Unearths good defects and can ask the right questions.
• Effective collaborator. Speaks clearly and succinctly in standups and clearly indicates the status of tasks assigned.
• Great team player, helps find defects, resolve with right test cases and data and can influence the right level of automation.
• High energy and is very efficient, effective, and reliable.
• The tests written and conducted by the resource is comprehensive and does not lead to too many escaped defects to production.
• Continuous improvement areas focusing on the right levels of automation.
• Exhibits the right attitude, agile mindset, and shift-left principles.
• Creative simulation of problems in production and right test data in internal test systems
• Understands the errors in logs and can troubleshoot product issues.
• Excellent oral and written communication. Ability to work as part of a team, demonstrate initiative, solve problems independently and supervise others.
• Create performance test reports, documentation, and best practices for the development and operations teams.
• Proficient communications skills and be comfortable leading meetings as needed. 
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills and root causes analysis 
• Passion for high quality work and attention to detail.
• Provide technical and architectural leadership in a global and diverse organization
• Automate, optimize and drive efficiency of effort, code and process
• Self-interested to develop in depth knowledge on technologies and tools used in performance testing and engineering.
• Ability to come forward with new ideas to continuously improve efficiency of the performance engineering process as technology evolves
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or related technical or business field
• 8+ years of relevant experience working as a developer or performance engineer.
• 5+ years of experience working in automated and continuously deployed environments.
• 5+ years of experience in any of the defect tracking tools like JIRA and test tracking tools like QMetry.
• 5+ years of experience coding in Java or Groovy and must have strong practical knowledge of Object-Oriented principles.
• 5+ years of understanding APIs and using tools like Postman, SOAP, or REST Assured.
• 4+ years of experience building performance test scripts using tools such as JMeter or BlazeMeter.
• 4+ years of experience in identifying memory leakage, connection issues and ability to find bottlenecks within various components of the application.
• 4+ years of experience troubleshooting issues using information from logs, tools like Kibana, ability to add the necessary monitors and alerts.
• 4+ years of experience in executing scripts under load, monitoring and capturing various metrics. Analyzing results and creating reports for stakeholders.
• 4+ years of experience with database testing (SQL/NoSQL).
• 4+ years of working in applications that followed Agile development lifecycle.
• 4+ years of experience and strong knowledge of performance monitoring and profiling tools
• 4+ years of experience in managing and mentoring a team of performance engineers, fostering their professional growth and ensuring effective teamwork.
• 3+ years of experience working with teams across geos.
• 3+ years of experience with tools such as Bitbucket or GitHub.
• 3+ years of experience in Cloud application development experience (Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or Amazon Web Services).
• Passion for high quality work and attention to detail.
• Superior communication and organizational skills.
• Ability to work as part of a team, demonstrate initiative and solve problems independently.

Extra Awesome:

• Proficiency in working with cloud-based applications, with a preference for expertise in Azure.
• Hands-on experience in testing native mobile applications.
• A deep understanding of networks and network architecture.
• A strong grasp of security layers within cloud infrastructure.
• Knowledge of Core Java, REST, and the Spring ecosystem.
• Extensive experience with SQL, including a strong understanding of queries, stored procedures, indexes, administration, replication, and related aspects.
• Proven expertise in analyzing key performance indicators such as CPU utilization, memory usage, network usage, garbage collection, and database parameters, as well as generating and interpreting database reports to assess application performance.
• Collaborate with architects and developers to influence the design and architecture of systems to meet performance goals.
• Provide performance-related design recommendations and guidance during the development phase.
• Sound knowledge of Kubernetes or an equivalent container orchestration platform.