Performance tester (contractor)

Are you an experienced Performance engineer with a passion for doing engineering right, care about NFRs as much as features, are customer centric and keen on building great engineering experiences? Then this is the role for you!

About us

Our sector is being held back by old tech, dismal processes and misaligned interests. Together, they create pointless complexity for financial planning and investment professionals, and provide outdated, overpriced experiences for customers. It's our mission to change all that.

We build technology that helps more people to invest - and invest well.

Our engineering allows forward-thinking firms to remove the hassle, lower the cost and improve the overall experience of investing - empowering more people to invest and be treated well.

With our embedded investment engine at their core, companies of all shapes and sizes can launch new investment platforms in record quick time - strengthening their proposition, growing their revenue, lowering their costs and improving their customer experience.

We are part of the Octopus Group - founded in 2000 with a mission to breathe new life into broken industries, Octopus has become one of the most disruptive and progressive companies across the financial services and energy sectors. It now has over 2,500 staff, serves 2.5 million customers and is proud to be a B Corp.

The role

We are looking for an experienced performance testing engineer to help shape and drive the development of our load testing framework. You'll use your expertise to promote best practices and provide our teams with the data they need to make informed decisions on areas that require improvement.

This is a hands-on contract role where you'll play a pivotal part in building out our performance testing capabilities. We're seeking someone who thrives in a fast-paced environment, enjoys collaborating on innovative projects, and is eager to mentor others in the team on best practices for performance testing.

The ideal candidate will have a proven track record in performance testing distributed systems. Our platform is built on AWS, with key technologies such as Lambda, ECS, API Gateway, S3, and MongoDB, alongside Datadog for monitoring and observability.

On a typical day, you will be

1. Working closely with the team to enhance our performance testing capabilities, using data-driven insights to highlight areas of focus.
2. Understanding our data structures and generating seed data to simulate at least 300% of our current data and API volumes.
3. Developing test scenarios that align with customer goals, collaborating with internal and external teams to define relevant use cases, and ensuring that our performance tests are reflective of real-world conditions.
4. Presenting test results in a clear, actionable format and supporting teams in understanding the findings, providing recommendations for improvement.
5. Correlating metrics from key systems, such as MongoDB, AWS, and Datadog, to determine how additional load impacts platform performance. Identifying potential performance optimisations, such as refining indexes, adjusting data structure, and considering horizontal or vertical scaling options.

You'll be successful if you

1. Have extensive experience in performance testing, particularly beyond API volumetric testing. You'll understand how to identify the limitations of the services we use, optimise them, and scale the platform's capacity.
2. Have the ability to dig deeper into AWS performance limitations. Finding the limits of the platform is only the beginning-understanding why these limits exist is crucial. For example, is it related to the logic in Lambda? Perhaps cold start performance is reducing the number of requests we can serve per second during burst periods? You'll ask the right questions and provide detailed insights to help drive improvements.
3. Have extensive experience with databases, understanding the impact of data design and index misuse on performance. We're looking for someone who looks beyond basic metrics and can provide actionable recommendations to optimise performance.

Our culture

We are proud to cultivate a culture first, human environment and genuinely listen to our people about what matters to them most. As a result, we're proud we've cultivated a transparent and inclusive environment that encourages diversity of thought, challenge and experimentation.

We want our customers to love working with us. It takes a committed culture, backed up by a series of non-negotiable operating principles that define how we work

1. Never settle
2. Take ownership
3. Be generous and candid

We have offices in London, Edinburgh and Bath. We're working as a hybrid team supporting each of our people to choose how they work best. We've always been supportive of flexible working that focuses on delivery and impact, rather than hours worked.

Next steps

Our aim is to build a diverse and inclusive company of awesome people, with unique skills, passions and experiences. We encourage everyone to join us, whatever your gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or background.

Please note that we do not provide sponsorship for candidates residing outside the UK. However, we welcome applications from individuals who possess valid work permits that allow them to work in the UK. If you already have the right to work in the UK or hold an eligible work permit, we encourage you to apply for this position.

If you're ready to take your skills to the next level and contribute to the success of our projects, go ahead and apply. We'd love to hear from you! Join our team and be a part of our exciting journey.