Performance Engineer

Role Title: Performance Engineer

Employment Type: Contract

Duration: 1 year with possible extensions

Preferred Location: Buffalo NY- Onsite 4 days a week

Role Description:

The Performance Engineer serves as a technical contributor responsible for designing, developing, executing, and analyzing performance testing solutions that ensure applications, services, and platforms meet scalability, reliability, and performance objectives. This role partners closely with application development teams, architects, infrastructure teams, and project stakeholders to identify performance risks early, support shift-left testing practices, and provide data-driven recommendations for performance optimization.

Primary Responsibilities

• Design, develop, execute, and maintain performance test scripts, scenarios, and frameworks for web, API, mobile, cloud, and distributed applications.
• Lead performance testing activities across all phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), including planning, scripting, execution, analysis, and reporting.
• Develop and maintain performance test assets using OpenText Core Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Cloud) and related tooling.
• Create and maintain automated performance test scripts using C and other applicable scripting languages.
• Analyze performance test results using Dynatrace and other monitoring tools to identify bottlenecks, root causes, and areas for optimization.
• Collaborate with application development, architecture, database, middleware, and infrastructure teams to resolve performance issues.
• Provide performance engineering guidance and best practices to development teams to support shift-left performance testing initiatives.
• Review application architectures, designs, and requirements to identify performance risks and recommend mitigation strategies.
• Develop performance test plans, workload models, success criteria, and executive-level performance reports.
• Support capacity planning, scalability testing, resiliency testing, and failover validation efforts.
• Assist in establishing and maintaining performance engineering standards, processes, and governance practices.
• Mentor junior engineers and provide technical guidance on performance testing methodologies and tools.
• Participate in troubleshooting complex production and pre-production performance issues.
• Maintain documentation of performance testing frameworks, scripts, procedures, and results.
• Understand and adhere to company risk, security, compliance, and regulatory requirements.

Requirements:

Education and Experience Required

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field; or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Minimum of 5 years of professional experience in software testing, performance engineering, or a related technical engineering discipline.
• Minimum of 3 years of hands-on experience with OpenText Core Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Cloud) or LoadRunner Enterprise.
• Experience developing and maintaining performance test scripts, writing a test plan, run test and analyze final results.
• Experience analyzing application performance and troubleshooting performance bottlenecks.
• Experience working within Agile and DevOps environments.
• Must have coding skills

Education and Experience Preferred

• Experience with BlazeMeter performance testing platforms.
• Experience with cloud-based performance testing in Azure or AWS environments.
• Experience using Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, or similar Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools.
• Financial services or highly regulated industry experience.
• Experience supporting enterprise-scale digital, mobile, API, and distributed systems.
• Performance testing certifications or industry-recognized technical certifications.
• Required Technical Skills
• OpenText Core Performance Engineering (LoadRunner Cloud) - Required
• LoadRunner Professional / VuGen - Required
• JMeter - Required
• C Programming - Required
• Performance Test Design and Workload Modeling
• API Performance Testing
• Web Application Performance Testing
• Performance Analysis and Bottleneck Identification
• Dynatrace or Equivalent APM Tools
• SDLC, Agile, and DevOps Methodologies
• Capacity and Scalability Testing
• Preferred Technical Skills
• BlazeMeter - Preferred
• Azure Load Testing
• CI/CD Integration of Performance Testing
• Mobile Performance Testing
• Database Performance Analysis
• Kubernetes and Container Technologies
• Cloud Performance Engineering