Senior QA Engineer Performance & Scalability

Job description

We're looking for a Senior QA Engineer, Performance & Scalability who doesn't wait to be told what to test. You'll own performance and scalability across our platform, 30+ microservices, event-driven flows, and the legacy dependencies that come with a real production system at scale. This isn't a "run a load test before release" role. This is a role where you make performance a first-class concern from day one, where you define the thresholds that decide pass or fail, and where you hold the bar when something is degrading and nobody yet knows why. You'll be the performance voice in every room you walk into, design discussions, architecture reviews, incident retrospectives. When latency spikes, you're already halfway through the trace. When a new service is being scoped, performance is already in the delivery plan because you put it there. What you can expect to be doing: Own Performance from Day One - You embed performance thinking into the delivery plan before code is written, not as an afterthought before release. You make performance testing a natural part of how teams build and ship — not a gate they hit at the end. Define What Good Looks Like - You own the thresholds, metrics, and SLOs that govern pass or fail. You decide what a breach means, you set the budgets (latency, error rate, throughput), and you make those signals objective enough that a pipeline can act on them without a human reading graphs. Test Services in Isolation, at Production Scale - You design and build performance tests for individual services, stubbing downstream and third-party dependencies so each journey is tested on its own merits. You map load to real production traffic to find where things bend and where they break. Lead Performance in CI - You integrate performance testing into CI/CD so regressions are caught automatically, early, and fast. You own the fail-fast signals and keep them trustworthy. Build Reusable, Scalable Assets - You build performance tests as code, reusable components, templates, and utilities that scale across teams and services. You handle data seeding and test setup so runs are repeatable and realistic. Diagnose, Don't Just Report - You root-cause regressions across the stack, reading logs and tracing requests through distributed systems to find the source yourself rather than waiting for someone to hand it to you. Reach Out and Drive Outcomes - You engage the right stakeholders, engineering, platform, product - to turn findings into fixes. You don't file a report and walk away; you drive the outcome. Influence Decisions - You raise performance and scalability risks early, challenge assumptions constructively, and bring people with you. When a design won't scale, you say so before it ships. What we’re looking for: 5+ years in performance engineering, with a track record of owning performance across complex, modern systems, not just executing someone else's load test. Deep performance testing expertise. Hands-on experience designing realistic load models, running load, stress, soak and spike tests, and interpreting results meaningfully. K6 or similar - You have real, hands-on depth with k6 for building and running performance tests. Monitoring and observability know-how. You're comfortable with tools like Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch or similar, and you use them proactively to correlate test results with what the system is actually doing, not just when something is already on fire. Strong programming ability. You're extremely strong in at least one language. We use TypeScript across our stack; if your fundamentals are solid in another language, we're confident you'll pick it up fast. Microservices and distributed systems. You understand service-oriented architectures, dependencies, and the realities of testing a service in isolation — stubbing, mocking, contract boundaries, as well as end-to-end. CI/CD fluency - You've integrated performance testing into CI/CD pipelines and understand how to keep feedback fast and signals reliable. Experience with AWS infrastructure is strongly preferred. Strong communication and presence. You participate fully in agile ceremonies and cross-team conversations. You don't sit quietly when something needs to be said Nice to Have Experience in fintech, wealth management, or regulated financial services. Experience using AI-assisted tooling to accelerate performance work. Contributions to internal quality guilds, communities of practice, or engineering culture initiatives. Experience mentoring engineers on performance and testing best practices. What we’re really looking for: ✍️ Beyond the skills and the experience, we want someone who operates with ownership and independence. You don't wait for permission to improve something. You see a gap in coverage, a flaky test, a missing dashboard — and you fix it. You treat the Wealth Management experience line as yours, and you hold yourself to the same standard you hold the product to. You're not a gatekeeper. You're a quality enabler. And you make every team you work with better at shipping reliable software. Interested? We'd love to hear from you. Apply and tell us about a time you changed how quality worked on a team, not just what you tested, but how you made testing better for everyone around you. ⏰ Working Hours ⏰ Monday to Thursday: 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM Friday: 8:00 AM – 4:00 PM (Start your weekend early!) Enjoy a structured yet balanced workweek, with an early Friday finish to kickstart your weekend! PERKS 🎁 £60,000 - £70,000 per annum Discretionary Performance-Related Annual Bonus Workplace pension scheme - We invest in your future with a workplace pension scheme , contributing 5% on earnings up to £50,000 . Plan ahead with confidence while you grow your career! 🚀 Private medical insurance (medical history disregarded) Employee Assistance Programme Cycle to work scheme Season ticket loan Free ChipX subscription for UK-based employees We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity Flexible working arrangements 28 days holiday plus bank holidays, plus the days between Christmas and New Year ✈️ Annual training budget for courses, workshops, or conferences to help you advance your career. £30 per month Chip Fitness Benefit to suit your Mental/Physical Wellbeing Company laptop Opportunity to have a huge impact on our product while fast-tracking your knowledge, responsibility and skills in a high-growth fintech startup 🚀 Our Interview Process: 📖 Video screen with someone from our Talent team Short take-home test Video technical interview with the hiring manager Final interview with Head of AI About Chip Chip’s mission is to make your life wealthy We're building the wealth super app of the future. An app to build your long-term wealth across savings, investments and pensions. We use technology to break down barriers so users can invest like the ultra-wealthy, giving them one simple place to manage, grow and protect their wealth. The Sunday Times listed Chip as the 6th fastest growing tech company in Britain… and we're not slowing down. Chip serves over 400,000 active customers and looks after over £6billion in assets. These customers trust us to build the most amazing product we can, so working at Chip comes with real purpose. Chip is being built by a fast-growing team of designers, developers, customer service professionals, marketers, banking experts, and entrepreneurs. Our funding story though is a little different. Chip is one of the most crowd-funded businesses in Europe, having raised over £50m from 29,000 investors, over 9 years. Crowdfunding is in our DNA and only Brewdog has more investors than Chip. Our vision To be the most personal digital wealth manager in the UK Who we are Chip has a creative and diverse team of 180, from all different backgrounds and industries. We’re driven and passionate people, but no one takes themselves too seriously. Don’t just take our word for it. We have a few awards under our belt, including Best Personal Finance App at the 2022, 2024 & 2025 British Bank Awards. Our Values Be ACCOUNTABLE Everything you do matters, Care about the end result, Challenge the norm, Disagree, yet commit to making it happen once a decision has been made, Do the best job possible Be BOLD Share our Ambition and do your bit to achieve it, Innovate: challenge the norm, break the mould and make it happen, Set goals that truly align with our mission, Do your best for our customers Be COLLABORATIVE Work cross-functionally - we win as a team, Build strong relationships based on trust, Treat others fairly and respectfully, Hold others to account, Be supportive and inclusive, Have fun together Equal Opportunities We are passionate and committed to our people and go beyond the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion. You will be working in an inclusive environment and be encouraged to bring your whole self to work. We will do all that we can to help you successfully balance your work and home life. As a growing business we will encourage you to develop your professional and personal aspirations, enjoy new experiences, and learn from the talented people you will be working with. It’s talent that matters to us and we encourage applications from people irrespective of their gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability status or caring responsibilities. Note to Agencies Chip does not accept unsolicited CVs from recruiters or employment agencies in response to any of our live roles on our career page. Chip will not consider or agree to payment of any referral compensation or recruiter fee relating to these unsolicited CVs. Chip explicitly reserves the right to hire those candidate(s) without any financial obligation to the recruiter or agency. Any unsolicited CVs, including those submitted to hiring managers, are deemed to be the property of Chip.