Lead Performance Tester (SDET) at Jobgether – UK

This position is posted by Jobgether on behalf of a partner company. We are currently looking for a Lead Performance Tester (SDET) in United Kingdom.

This senior technical leadership role sits at the intersection of performance engineering, test automation, and distributed systems validation within large-scale cloud communications platforms. The Lead Performance Tester will define and drive the end-to-end performance strategy across highly available, cloud-native architectures, ensuring systems can withstand real-world production loads with reliability and efficiency. This role combines hands-on engineering with strategic leadership, guiding a distributed guild of SDETs embedded across multiple teams. You will work closely with engineering, architecture, and data teams to design scalable performance frameworks, implement continuous performance testing in CI/CD pipelines, and validate system resilience under extreme conditions. The environment is fast-paced, highly collaborative, and deeply technical, with strong emphasis on observability, automation, and data-driven decision-making. This is a high-impact role influencing system performance, scalability, and user experience at global scale.

• Define and lead the overall performance engineering strategy across cloud-native, high-availability systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and resilience.
• Lead and mentor a distributed guild of SDETs, guiding performance testing practices and embedding performance ownership across engineering teams.
• Design, build, and evolve performance testing frameworks using tools such as k6, Python, Java, or TypeScript, focused on APIs, databases, and distributed infrastructure.
• Implement and manage advanced performance testing approaches including traffic replay, load simulation, and multi-tenant data generation to replicate production-scale conditions.
• Drive performance, load, stress, endurance, and chaos testing strategies, ensuring system robustness under failure scenarios and peak demand.
• Integrate performance testing into CI/CD pipelines to enable continuous validation, automated regression detection, and early performance issue identification.
• Collaborate with architecture and data teams to identify bottlenecks, optimize system design, and validate database and messaging infrastructure performance.
• Leverage observability tools to monitor, analyse, and troubleshoot system behavior, translating insights into actionable engineering improvements.
• Define and maintain performance benchmarks, SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets aligned with business and technical requirements.
• Work across monolithic and microservices architectures, ensuring consistent performance validation strategies across evolving systems.

• Extensive hands-on experience in backend performance engineering, test automation, and SDET leadership within complex distributed systems.
• Strong proficiency in performance testing tools such as k6, JMeter, or Gatling, including large-scale test design and execution.
• Proven experience with AWS cloud services (e.g., EC2, ECS, RDS, API Gateway) and performance optimization in cloud environments.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, or TypeScript for building performance frameworks and automation tooling.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, and high-throughput APIs.
• Experience implementing CI/CD-integrated performance testing using tools such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins.
• Strong knowledge of system design principles, including latency, throughput, concurrency, and fault tolerance.
• Hands-on experience with observability platforms such as Grafana, CloudWatch, or similar monitoring tools.
• Proven ability to lead and coordinate QA/SDET teams, driving performance engineering standards across multiple squads.
• Strong analytical mindset with the ability to translate performance data into actionable engineering decisions.

• Competitive salary aligned with senior technical leadership roles in cloud engineering.
• Fully remote working arrangement with flexibility across the United Kingdom.
• Opportunity to work on large-scale, globally used cloud communications platforms.
• Strong focus on professional development, technical growth, and continuous learning.
• Exposure to cutting-edge performance engineering practices, tools, and cloud-native architectures.
• Collaborative, engineering-driven culture with high autonomy and ownership.
• Opportunity to influence architecture, scalability, and reliability at global production scale.