Performance Test Engineer

NWEA has opening for Performance Test Engineer on our QA Reliability Engineering team located at our downtown Portland headquarters. Ideal candidate will have in depth experience with AWS technologies(EC2, Lambda, DynamoDB, API gateway) as it relates to performance tuning.

NWEA is looking for an experienced Performance Test Engineer interested in ensuring the stability, reliability, and performance of our SaaS assessment platform to join our QA Reliability Engineering Team. The QA Reliability Engineering team at NWEA is a hybrid development and operations team within our Technical Operations group. The primary focus of the team is to maintain the integrity and performance of our continuously-integrated platform through understanding the relationships between infrastructure-layer code, functional application pools, network and software-defined load balancers, Mongo, SQL and PostgreSQL databases, message queues and data caches, all running in a mixture of private data centers and Content Delivery Networks. This team uses a mixture of monitoring tools to identify and mitigate possible client affecting issues.

As part of this team, the Performance Test Engineer develops, configures and runs the load and stress tests and collects scalability and performance data. Working with the QA Reliability team and adjacent development teams, the Performance Test Engineer analyzes and publishes test results and troubleshoots failures occurring during the tests. The Performance Test Engineer recommends system configuration and tuning improvements based on observations made during the load tests.

Responsibilities
•Analyze the current state of the application and infrastructure, designing appropriate solutions

•and working with teams to implement them

Review each entire application stack and execute initiatives to reduce failures, defects and issues with overall performance

•Review code base and make recommendations for improving performance

•Maintain performance analysis tools and identify any negative changes to performance and working with the teams to resolve them

•Design, develop and execute automated tests to validate solutions and environments

•Maintain and extend the load test framework including all programs and scripts that prep environments, create data sets, consolidate results and clean up after load tests.

•Assist product teams to develop and maintain load test scripts and packages

•Assist product teams in constructing meaningful, well thought out load test workload models

•Work with product teams to move performance testing earlier in the development process through micro-benchmarking of individual services

•Help product teams define performance test success criteria

•Execute Load/Performance Tests that integrate workloads from multiple teams

•Perform analysis of performance test results

•Assist in finding and removing performance bottlenecks that prevent NWEA from exceeding its targeted concurrency and SLA goals

•Take initiative to advance the quality, performance, or scalability of our applications, by influencing the architecture or design of our products

•Collaborate with project architects and project lead developers to prove the validity of new software technologies

•Engage and improve NWEA’s software development methodology

Identify and work with the team to implement more efficient system procedures

•Participate in regular meetings, both within the team and across it, to discuss previous accomplishments, upcoming goals and any roadblocks in the way.

Skills and Abilities

•Experience with Maven, Nexus, Ant, Puppet, Foreman, Hiera, Continuous Integration, etc.

•Deep Linux systems knowledge and administration background, Windows experience is a plus

•Hands-on experience with system integration technologies such as Web Services, Enterprise Service Bus, Message Queue, etc.

•Hands-on experience with SQL with ability to apply experience to PostgreSQL

•Understanding of and ability to work within Java

•Demonstrated ability to follow through with all tasks, promises and commitments

•Ability to communicate and work effectively within priorities

•Ability to advocate ideas and to objectively participate in design critiques

•Ability to work under tight timelines in a fast-paced environment

•Good understanding of software design concepts

•Understanding of software development methodologies

•Understanding of Java EE mid-tier System Architecture principles

•Familiarity with UI components (JSF, RichFaces, AJAX, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc).

•Ability to solve complex problems

•Excellent analytical, troubleshooting and communication skills

•Experience with log aggregation and data analysis

•Experience with Application Performance Management (APM), Network Performance Management (NPM), and Real User Monitoring (RUM) tools and data are a big plus

•Ability to code in at least one scripting language (Ruby, Python, Lua, JavaScript, etc.)

•Ability to understand and communicate risk as it applies to system reliability and performance

•Ability to support the web platform during off-hours

•Strong written and oral communication skills
Education and Experience
•Minimum bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field; equivalent combination of education and experience will be considered in lieu of a degree

•5+ years relevant work experience in one or more of the following: Software QA Engineering, Software Development or Linux System Engineering.

•2+ years creating and performing Load/Performance tests with Jmeter.

•Demonstrated experience planning, developing, and collaborating on load test frameworks with: Python or Java

•Strong database knowledge preferably PostgreSQL and MongoDB.

•Understanding of Internet protocols and programming, including HTTP, session management, HTML.

•Experience, preferably extensive experience working in a Linux/UNIX based environment.

•Familiarity with networking (TCP/IP, DHCP, DNS, firewalls, routing) a plus.

•Experience identifying and measuring bottlenecks in multi-tier enterprise applications running on Linux platforms.

NWEA is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer and we do not discriminate against employees or job applicants on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other status or consideration protected by local, state and federal laws, except where a bona fide occupational qualification applies. Equal opportunity applies to hiring, promotion, training, compensation, and any other organizational action. NWEA’s written Affirmative Action Plan is available to all employees and job applicants upon request.