Location: Chicago, IL
Salary: $145,000.00 USD Annually - $175,000.00 USD Annually
Description: Lead Performance Test EngineerLocation and Work ArrangementChicago, Illinois
Hybrid schedule with 3 days per week onsite
Role OverviewWe're seeking a senior Performance Engineering leader to help validate the performance, resiliency, and recoverability of mission-critical, high-volume transaction platforms. This role combines hands-on performance testing expertise with disaster recovery and failover validation across complex cloud-native and distributed systems.
You'll lead performance engineering initiatives that directly support operational resilience, regulatory recovery objectives, and platform scalability. This is an ideal opportunity for someone who enjoys deep technical execution while also mentoring engineers, influencing testing strategy, and driving quality across multiple domains.
What You'll Do- Design and execute comprehensive performance testing strategies for large-scale, high-throughput systems.
- Define test plans, workload models, ramp-up scenarios, and capacity validation approaches.
- Build, maintain, and enhance performance test suites using tools such as LoadRunner, JMeter, and Gatling.
- Analyze performance results, identify bottlenecks, and partner with engineering teams on optimization efforts.
- Lead disaster recovery and failover testing across primary, secondary, and tertiary environments.
- Validate recovery objectives, including RTO/RPO requirements, system resiliency, and data integrity.
- Evaluate application behavior during regional failover events and multi-region deployments.
- Test and validate Kafka producer/consumer performance, throughput, lag, replication, and failover scenarios.
- Develop automated performance testing frameworks using Python, Java, and related technologies.
- Integrate performance validation into CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins and GitHub Actions.
- Correlate test outcomes with observability and monitoring platforms to provide actionable insights.
- Document testing methodologies, baselines, trends, and audit evidence.
- Collaborate with development, infrastructure, DevOps, and architecture teams on scalability and resilience planning.
- Mentor quality engineering professionals on performance engineering and disaster recovery testing best practices.
- Support testing efforts within highly regulated, high-availability environments.
What You Bring- 7+ years of hands-on experience in performance testing and performance engineering.
- 5+ years of experience designing and executing disaster recovery, failover, or business continuity testing.
- Strong expertise with LoadRunner, including enterprise-scale performance testing.
- Experience with JMeter and/or Gatling.
- Proficiency in Python, Java, or JavaScript for automation and test framework development.
- Hands-on experience working within AWS environments, including services supporting performance and scalability testing.
- Experience with Kafka performance validation, message throughput testing, and event-driven architectures.
- Knowledge of Kubernetes, containerized applications, and distributed systems performance testing.
- Experience integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines.
- Strong working knowledge of Linux and command-line performance analysis tools.
- Experience using observability and APM platforms such as Splunk, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, or similar solutions.
- Experience with relational databases, including performance analysis using SQL.
- Familiarity with test management and defect tracking platforms such as Jira, Zephyr, or similar tools.
- Strong communication, problem-solving, analytical, and stakeholder management skills.
Preferred Qualifications- Experience within financial services, capital markets, exchanges, clearing, settlement, payments, trading platforms, or other highly regulated industries.
- Experience testing low-latency, high-availability systems at enterprise scale.
- Knowledge of multi-region cloud and hybrid architecture testing strategies.
- Experience with UC4 (Automic) job scheduling and orchestration.
- Familiarity with API testing, contract testing, and service virtualization tools.
- Understanding of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) concepts, including SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs.
- Exposure to AI-assisted quality engineering and automated test generation technologies.
- Experience applying cost-aware performance engineering practices within cloud environments.
- AWS or performance engineering certifications.
- Experience in options, futures, or market infrastructure environments.
What Success Looks Like- Performance testing becomes a continuous and measurable quality practice across critical platforms.
- Recovery and failover exercises consistently validate business and regulatory objectives.
- Performance bottlenecks are identified early through automation and proactive testing.
- Platform reliability improves through repeatable testing, observability, and engineering collaboration.
- Engineering teams gain stronger performance testing capabilities through your leadership and mentorship.
Compensation and BenefitsBase Salary Range: $145,000 - $175,000
Additional incentive compensation may be available through a bonus program with target opportunities ranging from 8% to 15%, subject to eligibility and program terms.
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