Performance Architect

About the Job

We are seeking a Performance Architect - QA to join our R&D team as a senior individual contributor. You will shape our overarching performance strategy, partnering with Product Engineering, Architecture, SRE, DevOps, and R&D teams to deliver highly scalable, resilient, and low-latency products. In this role, you will own the performance engineering domain from an architectural perspective and bridge the gap between functional automation and non-functional engineering to ensure a holistic approach to system reliability. This position requires deep technical ownership and cross-functional influence without people-management responsibilities.

Required Experience and Qualifications

• Total Experience: 15+ years in QA, performance engineering, software engineering, automation, and performance architecture.
• SaaS Expertise: 10+ years of hands-on experience specifically with Software as a Service (SaaS).
• Core R&D: Mandatory experience in a Core Product, Core Engineering, or R&D organization, with a proven track record in commercial products, enterprise platforms, or distributed systems.
• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.

Technical Proficiency & Tooling

• Performance Testing & Custom Tooling: Expert command of frameworks such as K6, JMeter, and Gatling, along with experience building custom performance simulators, workload generators, service virtualization, or fault-injection tools.
• Infrastructure & Cloud: Hands-on proficiency with Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, and preferably AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) for autoscaling and high availability.
• Programming Languages: Strong programming experience in Java, Python, Go, C#, or equivalent.
• Functional Automation: Advanced proficiency in frameworks like Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium to drive comprehensive end-to-end system validation.

Architectural & Engineering Focus

• SRE & Observability: Establish data-driven Performance Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Objectives (SLOs) so that performance degradation triggers actionable error budget policies across microservices. Leverage real-time SRE observability feeds and APM dashboards (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing) to build predictive workload models for infrastructure scaling.
• Chaos & Resilience Engineering: Lead chaos and resilience engineering initiatives involving fault injection, dependency failures, traffic surges, failover validation, and self-healing scenarios.
• Protocol-Level Edge Cases: Design malformed payload and edge-case protocol mutation suites (Stateful & Protocol-Level Fuzzing for HTTP/2, gRPC, WebSocket) to uncover and resolve latency spikes, thread starvation, and memory leaks within complex multi-tenant platforms.
• System Integration & CI/CD: Drive overall system-level QA improvements by seamlessly integrating both performance and functional testing into automated CI/CD pipelines (Continuous Verification).
• Distributed Systems Architecture: Apply deep knowledge of microservices, event-driven architectures, cloud-native design patterns, load balancing strategies, and Istio service mesh.

Why Join?

• High-Impact Senior IC Role: Gain significant technical ownership and a direct seat at the table to shape product architecture across Core Engineering and R&D.
• Architectural Influence: Lead shift-left performance strategies while championing comprehensive system-level QA improvements across functional and non-functional paradigms.
• Complex Problem Solving: Tackle intricate, cutting-edge challenges surrounding extreme scalability, system resilience, and distributed multi-tenant systems using data-driven insights.