Introduction
At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'll have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.
Your Role And Responsibilities
As a Senior Performance Test Engineer, you will own the performance engineering and testing of our products in our post-quantum cryptography, while also contributing to QA leadership. You will:
- Design, plan, and execute performance test strategies across load, stress, soak, spike, volume, and scalability scenarios.
- Develop and maintain automated performance test suites and reusable frameworks using industry-standard tools.
- Define/refine performance KPIs, baselines, SLAs/SLOs and monitor trends release-over-release.
- Analyze system and application metrics to identify bottlenecks across application, data, and infrastructure layers.
- Collaborate with engineering, DevOps, and product teams to recommend and validate performance optimizations.
- Integrate performance tests into CI/CD with automated thresholds and regression detection.
- Leverage observability tools, such as Grafana/Prometheus for dashboards, alerts, and deep dives.
- Produce clear, actionable performance reports and present insights to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Contribute to QA leadership: help shape test strategy, structure suites in TestRail, mentor QA engineers, support triage and release readiness.
Preferred Education
Master's Degree
Required Technical And Professional Expertise
- 5+ years of professional experience in software testing, with strong specialization in performance testing/engineering.
- Hands-on expertise with JMeter and/or LoadRunner; familiarity with Gatling, k6, or Locust is a plus.
- Demonstrated capability in API and backend/microservices performance testing, including workload modeling and data management.
- Strong understanding of throughput, latency analysis, concurrency, capacity/scalability, and bottleneck diagnosis.
- Observability: practical experience with Grafana and Prometheus; working knowledge of Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, or ELK.
- Scripting/programming for automation and data processing (Python / Java / JavaScript / Bash).
- Experience integrating performance suites with CI/CD systems such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps.
- Hands-on use of profiling tools.
- Awareness of performance considerations on containerized environments (Docker/Kubernetes).
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate technical findings into business-impact recommendations.
Preferred Technical And Professional Experience
- Experience designing scalable, reusable performance test harnesses and supporting libraries.
- Background in reliability/performance incident analysis and capacity planning.
- Experience contributing to QA process improvements, test strategy, and quality governance.
- Prior mentoring/coaching experience or interest in stepping into broader QA leadership responsibilities.
- Experience with test management tools (e.g., TestRail) and traceability from requirements to test coverage.
