Senior Performance Engineer

Experian is the world’s leading global information services company. During life’s big moments — from buying a home or a car to sending a child to college to growing a business by connecting with new customers — we empower consumers and our clients to manage their data with confidence. We help individuals to take financial control and access financial services, businesses to make smarter decisions and thrive, lenders to lend more responsibly, and organizations to prevent identity fraud and crime.

We have 17,800 people operating across 44 countries, and every day we’re investing in new technologies, talented people and innovation to help all our clients maximize every opportunity. We are listed on the London Stock Exchange (EXPN) and are a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.

Learn more at www.experianplc.com or visit our global content hub at our global news blog for the latest news and insights from the Group

Experian is the world’s leading global information services company. During life’s big moments — from buying a home or a car to sending a child to college to growing a business by connecting with new customers — we empower consumers and our clients to manage their data with confidence. We help individuals to take financial control and access financial services, businesses to make smarter decisions and thrive, lenders to lend more responsibly, and organizations to prevent identity fraud and crime.

We have 17,800 people operating across 44 countries, and every day we’re investing in new technologies, talented people and innovation to help all our clients maximize every opportunity. We are listed on the London Stock Exchange (EXPN) and are a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.

Learn more at www.experianplc.com or visit our global content hub at our global news blog for the latest news and insights from the Group

The ESS is looking for someone to join the team responsible for performance and resilience testing for existing and new products.  The team is part of the Quality Practice, which complements our software engineering organization and is involved in all aspects of the development lifecycle working across multiple engineering teams operating in an agile environment.  Our approach is to left-shift quality to the greatest extent possible; thus, techniques and procedures that we develop in the Practice are transferred to the teams for routine execution.  There is a strong emphasis on Test Automation, in which we consider ourselves as world class.

The principal focus is on the Experian One SaaS platform and applications that run on it, but the role will involve activities around our on-premise product set from time to time.  Most of the products are written in Java, and for Experian One are running in containers on OpenShift or Amazon EKS clusters and use predominantly PostgreSQL as the underlying database, with some Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server; the on-premise deployments use the same databases but run on a variety of hardware architectures (Windows, Linux, AIX, Mainframe).

The scope of performance testing includes batch processing, User Interface responses, and a variety of APIs, for all the products.  In the SaaS offerings, the scope also includes Resilience testing is related to the SaaS offerings; scaling (including autoscaling), and performance optimization to control and reduce operational cost.

You will influence our future product evolution by defining and establishing processes and tools for performance testing, assessing and proposing tools and techniques that increase efficiency and accuracy (including not only execution but also reporting); identifying problems in the performance and resiliency space and proposing solutions for them, and empowering the product development teams to become increasingly knowledge-aware and autonomous in this highly technical area.

Responsibilities:

• Analyse operational performance and benchmark requirements and design performance test strategies with focus on the performance of entire systems, including but not limited to resiliency, scalability and efficiency.
• Develop and run tests and analyse output, working with development teams to identify problem areas and tuning solutions to improve performance.
• Propose improvements to the products and their ecosystems relating to performance, scalability, and resilience (working with Product Owners and Product Managers as well as development teams and SRE)
• Independently manage end-to-end performance and resilience testing projects.  Plan efforts required and provide effective communication to the business on plans, progress, risks, and issues
• Understand the architecture of the product and its ecosystems (particularly SaaS) and their effect on performance.
• Manage performance test environments running on AWS, including optimization of cost efficiency.
• Produce of benchmark documentation suitable for use by our delivery teams and clients.
• Understand system workload profile to develop capacity model to be used for environment right-sizing and inputs to capacity planning.
• Propose and implement improvements to performance and resilience testing across our product portfolio.
• Automate the performance and resilience tests to enable frequent verification that performance levels are maintained.
• Transfer knowledge to our worldwide teams to enable them to run, analyse and tune our software solutions.

• Experience in performance engineering (including testing, analysis, tuning, and code improvement, and some automation).
• Passion for performance and related disciplines; up to date on latest methods and best practices for performance and resiliency testing.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Good time-management and multi-tasking abilities.
• Experience of software development lifecycle and software testing methodologies, especially Agile.
• Good written and verbal communication skills, including user-focussed documentation of results.
• Good influencing skills.
• Very good knowledge of cloud native architectures (microservices, containerization, etc.)
• Good knowledge of software architecture, operating systems, computer networks, databases, and SQL
• Good understanding of Java/JVM performance tuning.
• University Degree in Computer Science or a numerical discipline with a high computing content preferred.

Experience with the following will be required:

• Java applications running in distributed environments with high operational requirements.
• Development and Test tools including JMeter (or equivalents).
• WebSphere or Tomcat, PostgreSQL and Oracle, SOAP, REST, XML.
• Programming in languages such as Java, Python, Groovy.
• Use of Cloud environments and technologies such as Kubernetes (or equivalents).
• Development and Test tools: Jira, Jenkins, Bitbucket

Experience with the following will be beneficial:

• Ansible and Terraform.
• Application monitoring tools such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics or Grafana.
• JVM performance monitoring and understanding of key parameters.
• AWS services such as EC2, Serverless, RDS, CloudWatch.

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