Performance Load Test Architect / Lead

Description of Duties

• Define and own the overall performance engineering strategy for the program.
• Develop enterprise performance testing standards, governance, methodologies, and best practices.
• Define workload models using historical production metrics and anticipated business growth.
• Establish non-functional requirements (NFRs), service level objectives (SLOs), service level agreements (SLAs), and performance acceptance criteria.
• Lead performance planning activities for various phases including Solution Confirmation, PI Planning, SIT, UAT, Go-Live, and Hypercare.
• Review solution architecture to identify scalability risks, performance bottlenecks, and infrastructure constraints early in the SDLC.
• Provide technical leadership for capacity planning and infrastructure sizing recommendations.

Performance Engineering Leadership

• Lead performance testing across various platforms and applications such as SAP BRIM, SAP Convergent Mediation, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Datasphere, Dynamics CRM Customer Engagement, Middleware, REST/SOAP APIs, Batch processing, Event-driven integrations, Customer web portal, Mobile applications, IVR, and chatbot platforms.
• Define enterprise load profiles for concurrent users, transaction volumes, billing cycles, payment processing, toll transactions, financial processing, and customer service operations.
• Review and approve performance test plans, scripts, workloads, and execution schedules developed by performance analysts.

Architecture, Monitoring & Analysis

• Define enterprise monitoring strategy across application, middleware, SAP, database, infrastructure, and cloud platforms.
• Analyze application response times, throughput, resource utilization, JVM metrics, database performance, middleware queues, API latency, and infrastructure bottlenecks.
• Lead root-cause analysis with development, SAP, CRM, infrastructure, middleware, and vendor teams.
• Recommend application tuning, database optimization, infrastructure scaling, and configuration improvements.
• Validate system readiness for production deployment.

Tooling & Automation

• Lead implementation and administration of NeoLoad as the enterprise performance testing platform.
• Define reusable scripting frameworks and standards.
• Establish automated performance regression testing for major releases.
• Develop performance dashboards and executive reporting.

Collaboration & Leadership

• Present performance status, risks, bottlenecks, and mitigation strategies to executive leadership and project governance boards.
• Fully document all created work associated with this position, including technical and functional designs and diagrams, test plans, test scripts, impact analysis reports, lessons learned, and best practices for others to follow.
• Adhere to and follow all organizational standards, policies, and procedures.

Minimum Experience/Skillset

• 12 years of overall IT experience.
• 8 years of enterprise performance engineering and load testing experience.
• 5 years leading enterprise performance testing initiatives.
• Expert-level experience with NeoLoad.
• Experience architecting performance testing solutions for enterprise-scale applications.
• Strong experience with SAP BRIM, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Convergent Mediation, SAP Datasphere, CRM platforms, APIs, middleware, and enterprise integrations.
• Experience designing production workload models using historical production metrics.
• Strong knowledge in areas such as capacity planning, performance engineering, scalability architecture, stress, endurance, spike, and failover testing, API and middleware performance testing, batch processing optimization, cloud and hybrid infrastructure performance, and performance monitoring and diagnostics.

Certifications / Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field.
• NeoLoad certification preferred.
• Cloud certifications (Azure or AWS) are preferred.