Lead Performance Test Engineer - Companies House - SEO

This is an exciting opportunity within the Digital Services team at Companies House. You’ll be joining us at a time of transformation, playing a key role in shaping the future of our testing and quality assurance approach. We follow Agile methodologies and foster a culture of continuous improvement. 

We are looking for an enthusiastic Lead Performance Test Engineer with strong technical skills, capable of coaching and mentoring other testers while leading the performance testing strategy across our services. You will oversee performance testing efforts, ensuring our systems are scalable, reliable, and performant under load. 

As part of our Non-functional testing team, you will work collaboratively with scrum, dev-ops and support teams, overseeing performance testing and ensuring our systems meet the highest quality standards. You will advocate for performance excellence, drive innovation in non-functional testing, and explore emerging tools and methodologies to enhance service delivery. 

Watch this video to find out more about working in Digital at Companies House

This is a rewarding role within the Test Team and provides an opportunity to contribute to the success of existing and future services provided by Companies House. 

Companies House offers a flexible and welcoming culture that promotes a healthy work life balance as well as a proactive approach to wellbeing that allows us to be our best at work.  We recognise that people are the key to our success so offer a fantastic benefits package including flexible working with no core hours, 30 days annual leave, 8 bank holidays and 1 privilege day as well as enrolment into the Civil Service Pension scheme with a contribution rate averaging 28%.   

Find out more about what a great place Companies House is to work

Job description

As a Lead Performance Test Engineer, you will: 

• Lead the design, implementation, and execution of performance testing strategies, ensuring our services meet key performance indicators.
• Take ownership of performance testing within the automated pipeline, primarily using JMeter integrated with our CI/CD process (Concourse).
• Analyse system performance, identify bottlenecks, and work closely with developers, architects, and DevOps engineers to optimise performance.
• Establish and maintain performance baselines, stress testing, load testing, and scalability testing frameworks.
• Provide technical leadership in non-functional testing, including reliability, and accessibility testing.
• Drive best practices and mentor other testers in performance testing techniques and tools.
• Research, recommend, and implement emerging tools to improve the efficiency and accuracy of performance testing.
• Collaborate with teams across Companies House to champion a performance-first mindset throughout the development lifecycle.
• Document, and maintain performance testing standards, best practices, methodologies, runbooks, and findings using collaboration platforms such as Confluence, SharePoint, or other designated tools. Ensure knowledge is effectively shared and accessible across relevant teams. 

Learn more about the skills required of a Lead Test Engineer 

Person specification

We are looking for the following experience and skills which will be assessed at sift and interview. 

Experience:

• At least 2 years of hands-on experience with JMeter, Gatling, k6, or similar performance testing tools.
• Proficient in scripting or coding using a mainstream programming language, such as Java.
• Proficiency at using version control systems, preferably Git.
• Experience coaching and mentoring others, with strong interpersonal skills to foster a culture of collaboration and learning. 
• Experience testing stand-alone services as well as complex systems built of many microservices / sub-systems. 
• Experience testing at UI, API as well as back-end levels.
• Working experience with various types of databases (MongoDB, Oracle, SQL, InfluxDB).
• Familiarity with monitoring tools like New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus, or Datadog.
• Knowledge of AWS cloud environments and performance testing in cloud-based architectures.
• Knowledge of containerisation tools (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with CI/CD tools (e.g., Jenkins, Concourse, GitHub Actions) to integrate performance testing.
• Familiarity with message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Experience accessibility testing. 

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Making Effective Decisions
• Managing a Quality Service
• Working Together
• Seeing the Big Picture

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Performance testing