Job Summary:
The Senior Performance Engineer Test is responsible for defining, implementing, and evolving the performance engineering strategy for ICANN’s mission-critical applications and services. This role ensures that software systems meet performance, scalability, reliability, and resiliency objectives before production deployment. The ideal candidate combines strong software engineering skills with deep expertise in performance testing, workload modeling, capacity planning, observability, and cloud-native architectures. Working closely with software engineers, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Product Management, and QA teams, this individual will proactively identify performance bottlenecks, optimize system behavior, and establish performance engineering best practices throughout the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
Key Responsibilities:
Define and drive the organization’s performance engineering roadmap.
Partner with engineering and product teams to establish non-functional requirements (NFRs), SLAs, SLOs, and performance acceptance criteria.
Develop performance testing strategies for new products, platform enhancements, and production releases.
Identify performance risks early and recommend mitigation strategies.
Design, develop, and maintain reusable performance testing frameworks and automation.
Build realistic workload models that simulate customer usage patterns.
Develop load, stress, endurance, spike, scalability, and capacity tests.
Create synthetic datasets and test environments that closely mirror production.
Integrate performance tests into CI/CD pipelines
Execute performance tests and analyze throughput, latency, resource utilization, concurrency, and system stability.
Identify bottlenecks across application, API, database, middleware, caching, messaging, and infrastructure layers.
Profile applications using APM and profiling tools to isolate CPU, memory, thread, and I/O issues.
Collaborate with engineering teams to optimize application performance.
Validate performance improvements through repeatable benchmarking.
Evaluate application performance in Kubernetes and cloud-native environments.
Validate autoscaling behavior, resilience, failover, and disaster recovery scenarios.
Benchmark infrastructure scalability across compute, storage, databases, and networking.
Partner with DevOps and SRE teams to ensure production-like performance environments.
Support capacity planning and infrastructure sizing.
Develop dashboards for performance KPIs using Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, or similar platforms.
Monitor application health and establish proactive alerting.
Analyze production telemetry and recommend architectural improvements.
Participate in production readiness reviews and post-incident performance analysis.
Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs):
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or related discipline. Master’s degree preferred.
Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, APIs, and cloud-native architectures.
Expert knowledge of performance testing methodologies including:
Load Testing
Stress Testing
Endurance (Soak) Testing
Spike Testing
Scalability Testing
Capacity Planning
Proficiency with performance testing tools such as:
Apache JMeter
Gatling
k6
Locust
BlazeMeter
Experience developing automated performance tests using Java, Python, or JavaScript.
Strong understanding of HTTP/HTTPS, REST APIs, WebSockets, gRPC, and messaging platforms.
Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
Experience integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps.
Experience with observability platforms including Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, or AppDynamics.
Strong understanding of relational and NoSQL databases and performance tuning.
Knowledge of caching technologies such as Redis and Memcached.
Experience with Linux/Unix environments.
Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills.
Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
Ability to communicate technical findings to both engineering and executive stakeholders.
Education and Experience Requirements
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or related field.
Minimum eight (8) years of software testing or performance engineering experience.
Minimum five (5) years designing and executing enterprise-scale performance testing.
Minimum five (5) years of automation development using Java, Python, or similar languages.
Minimum three (3) years working with Kubernetes and cloud-native applications.
Minimum three (3) years integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines.
Experience with API performance testing.
Experience tuning SQL queries and databases.
Experience analyzing JVM or .NET runtime performance.
Experience with APM and observability platforms.
Experience with distributed systems, messaging technologies (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.), and containerized applications.
Experience with DNS, RDDS, RDAP, EPP, Registry-Registrar model, or Internet infrastructure is highly desirable.
Language
Fluency, both written and spoken, in English is required
ICANN is a global organization that values diversity; preference will be given to candidates with demonstrated skills in additional languages besides English
Working Conditions & Physical Requirements:
Work is performed in a normal office environment with limited privacy and some exposure to background noise
While performing the duties of this job, the employee is frequently required to stand and walk. The employee regularly is required to sit. The employee is frequently required to talk or hear; use hands to finger, handle or feel; and to reach with hands and arms. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, color vision, and ability to adjust focus.
The employee may occasionally lift and/or move up to 25 pounds
