Lead Performance Tester (SDET)

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.

Accountabilities

• 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.
  
  

Requirements

• 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.
  
  

Benefits

Browse our curated collection of remote jobs across all categories and industries, featuring positions from top companies worldwide.

• 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.
  
  

How Jobgether Works

We use an AI-powered matching process to ensure your application is reviewed quickly, objectively, and fairly against the role's core requirements. Our system identifies the top-fitting candidates, and this shortlist is then shared directly with the hiring company. The final decision and next steps (interviews, assessments) are managed by their internal team.

We appreciate your interest and wish you the best!

Why Apply Through Jobgether?

Data Privacy Notice: By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Jobgether will process your personal data to evaluate your candidacy and share relevant information with the hiring employer. This processing is based on legitimate interest and pre-contractual measures under applicable data protection laws (including GDPR). You may exercise your rights (access, rectification, erasure, objection) at any time.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.