Senior Software Performance Engineer at Toshiba (Wroclaw)

The Senior Software Performance Engineer is responsible for leading performance optimisation initiatives, providing strategic guidance, and mentoring junior engineers. This role requires advanced expertise in performance testing, analysis, and system architecture.

Key Responsibilities

Performance Monitoring:

• Architect and manage sophisticated performance monitoring setups.
• Design and implement distributed tracing and observability pipelines to correlate performance anomalies with system events.
• Establish and track Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) for critical system components.

Performance Testing:

• Lead the design and implementation of complex performance testing strategies.
• Integrate chaos engineering practices into performance testing—inject failures (network partitions, node failures, latency spikes) to validate system behaviour under real-world conditions.
• Design and execute performance tests that measure graceful degradation, not just peak throughput.
• Use AI to generate realistic load test scenarios from production traffic patterns (not just synthetic benchmarks)
• Analyse performance test results to uncover systemic issues.

Resilience & Fault Tolerance:

• Evaluate and implement resilience patterns including circuit breakers, bulkheads, retry policies, and backpressure mechanisms.
• Collaborate with architecture teams to design systems that degrade gracefully under partial failure rather than cascading.
• Define and validate recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) through targeted testing.
• Lead capacity planning that accounts for failure scenarios, not just growth projections.

Software Planning & Development:

• Lead the performance development of fixes and features using best practices of software development.
• Develop and implement performance engineering strategies and roadmaps.
• Contribute to architectural decisions with a focus on performance-reliability tradeoffs.

Analysis and Optimisation:

• Conduct in-depth analysis of performance test results to uncover systemic issues.
• Collaborate with senior development and operations teams to resolve performance bottlenecks.
• Drive performance improvements and optimisations across multiple projects.
• Analyse cost-performance tradeoffs, particularly for cloud infrastructure and auto-scaling policies.
• Identify and optimise resource-intensive operations, including database queries, API calls, and compute-heavy workloads.

Collaboration and Communication:

• Lead cross-functional teams in performance-related initiatives.
• Present performance test results and strategic recommendations to senior stakeholders.
• Mentor junior engineers and lead performance-related initiatives.
• Partner with SRE and DevOps teams on incident response for performance-related outages.
• Participate in post-incident reviews and drive systemic fixes to prevent recurrence.

Documentation:

• Oversee the documentation of performance testing methodologies and results.
• Ensure comprehensive and accurate performance-related documentation for future reference.
• Maintain runbooks for performance-related incident response and recovery procedures.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or related field.
• 7+ years of experience in performance testing and engineering.
• Expert proficiency with performance testing tools (e.g., JMeter, LoadRunner).
• Understanding of performance tuning, capacity planning, and optimisation techniques.
• Programming skills and a deep understanding of system architecture.
• Extensive experience with monitoring tools (e.g., Dynatrace, New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus).
• Strong programming skills in Java, Python, Bash, PowerShell or C++.
• Exceptional problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Proven leadership and mentoring abilities.
• Advanced experience with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Expertise in microservices architecture and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• In-depth knowledge of CI/CD pipelines.
• Advanced understanding of database performance tuning.
• Published work or contributions to performance engineering communities