Senior/Principal Performance QA Engineer

Ontic provides software that helps corporate and government security teams identify threats, assess risk, and respond faster to keep people and organizations safe. Its Connected Intelligence Platform unifies security operations and data into a centralized system of record, enabling organizations to conduct risk assessments, protect against workplace violence, and manage threats and incidents more efficiently. Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies rely on Ontic to support security programs such as executive protection, threat intelligence, and corporate investigations.

Key Responsibilities

• Strong understanding of performance testing tools such as JMeter, LoadRunner, and Gatling.
• Convert NFRs/SLOs into measurable test objectives (throughput, p95/p99 latency, error budgets).
• Build realistic workload models including concurrency, think time, data mix, caching, spike/soak patterns, and canary strategies.
• Define environment parity and test data strategies to ensure credible results.
• Design scalable JMeter scripts with correlation, parameterization, data feeders, and custom logic (JSR223).
• Execute load, stress, spike, endurance/soak, capacity, and baseline tests across services and UI/API layers.
• Create reusable components/utilities to speed up authoring and reduce maintenance effort.
• Integrate performance suites into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins/GitHub Actions) with automated thresholds and budgets.
• Establish performance release gates (pass/fail criteria, canary checks, rollback triggers) and lead go/no-go decisions.
• Publish and maintain the performance release checklist (warm-up, ramp-up, data hygiene, isolation, noise control).
• Leverage APM/observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, CloudWatch) to correlate metrics with test KPIs.
• Perform bottleneck analysis (CPU, GC, threads, DB query plans, caches, Kafka/queues, downstream dependencies).
• Produce clear performance reports with trends, variance against budgets, and actionable tuning recommendations.
• Validate environment configurations (instance types, autoscaling, TLS, caches) and eliminate client-side bottlenecks.
• Enforce warm-ups, steady-state validation, and repeatability, flagging any noise sources.
• Maintain baselines and flakiness detection for performance test results.
• Lead/mentor a small team when required (code reviews, coaching, establishing standards).
• Collaborate with Dev, DevOps, DBA, and SRE teams on triage, tuning, and verifying fixes.
• Drive post-release performance verification (canary checks, observability reviews) and participate in incident retrospectives.

Must-Have Qualifications

• 7–10 years of experience in performance engineering for web services and distributed systems.
• Strong, hands-on JMeter expertise (advanced correlation, JSR223 scripting, custom functions, backends/listeners).
• Solid knowledge of HTTP/REST, TLS, concurrency, caching, connection pooling, and asynchronous patterns.
• Proven experience integrating performance tests into CI/CD and enforcing SLO/threshold-based gates.
• Skilled with APM/observability tools and infra/DB analysis (GC, heap, thread dumps, slow queries).
• Scripting experience in Java, Groovy, or Python for utilities, data generation, and JMeter extensions.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to translate data into insights and influence release outcomes.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Exposure to cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) and container environments (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with protocols (gRPC, WebSocket) and Kafka throughput/latency testing.
• Strong understanding of DB performance (indexing, query plans, connection limits across MySQL/Postgres/NoSQL).
• Awareness of security–performance interplay (ciphers, WAF/CDN) and edge/CDN caching strategies.
• Experience with service virtualization and synthetic data platforms.

End-to-End Performance Release Ownership

You will:

• Define and enforce performance budgets through CI gates.
• Run canary performance checks and validate stability with live metrics before full rollout.
• Document go/no-go decisions with supporting evidence (APM dashboards, logs, charts).
  Ontic Benefits & Perks
• Competitive Salary
• Medical Benefits
• Internet Reimbursement
• Home Office Stipend
• Continued Education Stipend
• Festive & Achievement Celebrations
• Dynamic Office Environment
  Ontic is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to a work environment that celebrates diversity. We do not discriminate against any individual based on race, color, sex, national origin, age, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, military or veteran status, disability, or any factors protected by applicable law.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Ontic we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Ontic prioritizes the full inclusion of qualified individuals, providing necessary accommodations for those with disabilities to perform essential job functions. If you need assistance during the application or interview process or job tasks, please contact us at recruitment@ontic.co or call (512) 572-7400

Engineering