Performance Tester

Senior Performance Engineer - Dublin

Location: Dublin, Ireland
Contract: 12 months, with potential to extend
Daily Rate: Up to €550-600 per day
Hybrid: 3 days per week
Start Date: ASAP

Stamp 4 visa, EU Passport and UK Passport only accepted. Candidates must be based in Ireland

The Opportunity

We are looking for an experienced Senior Performance Engineer to join a high-performing engineering team working on critical, high-volume digital transaction platforms.

This is a new role within a performance engineering function, offering the opportunity to have a significant impact on the speed, scalability, resilience and overall quality of applications supporting a global technology environment.

You will work closely with software development teams to design and execute performance testing, investigate complex performance issues and drive improvements across applications, databases, Middleware and infrastructure.

What You'll Be Doing

• Design, configure and execute performance and load tests, driving the resolution of performance issues and test failures.
• Define and measure key performance indicators including requests per second, concurrency, response times, query performance and system utilisation.
• Perform deep-dive performance analysis across Java applications, databases, Middleware and third-party/vendor technologies.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and lead root-cause analysis across application, database and infrastructure layers.
• Develop and enhance performance test frameworks, automation and supporting tools.
• Define non-functional requirements, workload models, test strategies and performance acceptance criteria.
• Support capacity planning, scalability assessments, resiliency testing and performance forecasting.
• Test complex workloads including APIs, batch processing, event-driven systems, messaging and asynchronous architectures.
• Integrate performance testing into CI/CD pipelines, including automated performance quality gates.
• Use observability and monitoring platforms to analyse metrics, logs, traces and telemetry.
• Leverage AI and GenAI/LLM technologies to improve performance engineering through test design, script generation, workload modelling, analysis and reporting.
• Coach and support junior engineers, sharing knowledge and best practices.
• Present performance findings, recommendations and results to technical and business stakeholders.

What We're Looking For

• Strong hands-on experience with performance testing tools such as JMeter, LoadRunner or StormRunner.
• Strong programming and automation capability using Java, Groovy, Python, Shell or equivalent.
• Extensive end-to-end performance engineering experience covering NFR definition, workload modelling, test strategy, execution, analysis and reporting.
• Proven ability to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across applications, databases and infrastructure.
• Strong experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana, AppDynamics or Prometheus.
• Experience working with cloud-native and distributed architectures, including microservices and APIs.
• Experience with private cloud platforms such as PCF/MKS would be advantageous.
• Strong SQL and database performance tuning experience, including query optimisation and relational databases.
• Experience integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines and implementing automated quality gates.
• Strong understanding of capacity planning, scalability, resiliency and performance forecasting.
• Experience working with complex API, batch, messaging and asynchronous workloads.
• Experience using AI-assisted tools for performance analysis, anomaly detection, bottleneck identification or automated insights.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills with strong attention to detail.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively with developers, engineers and wider stakeholders.
• Ability to manage competing priorities, work independently and operate effectively in a fast-paced environment.

Desirable

• Experience within financial services, payments or card technology.
• Knowledge of Agile and SAFe delivery methodologies.
• Strong understanding of the software development life cycle.
• Experience mentoring or coaching other engineers.

Why Apply?

This is an excellent opportunity for a senior performance specialist to work on large-scale, highly critical technology platforms, tackling challenging performance and scalability problems while helping shape modern performance engineering practices.

If you are passionate about performance, automation, observability and solving complex technical problems, we'd like to hear from you.