Software Diagnostics & Performance Test Engineer

SOTI; Ernakulam; Hybrid; INR 1,000,000 - 2,100,000; Full time

Job summary

SOTI is seeking an experienced Performance/Reliability Engineer to investigate complex software failures and performance issues across application, system, network, and infrastructure layers. The role involves deep diagnostic work, extracting insights from logs and traces, and mentoring others in systematic debugging.

You will design experiments, develop diagnostics, and collaborate with developers to identify root causes and actionable fixes that improve product reliability and scalability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in software/performance/reliability engineering or related field.
• Proficient in at least one major language such as Java, C++, C#, Python.
• Strong ability to read unfamiliar code and troubleshoot complex problems.
• Solid understanding of OS concepts, networking fundamentals, and logs/traces.
• Experience with profiling, performance analysis, and TEST CASE creation.

Responsibilities

• Investigate complex software failures and performance problems.
• Perform root-cause analysis across application, network, and infra layers.
• Analyze logs, traces, heap dumps, metrics, and profiling data.
• Design experiments and build diagnostic tools to isolate issues.
• Collaborate with developers to identify root causes and corrective actions.
• Communicate findings with evidence, impact, and recommendations.
• Mentor engineers in debugging and systematic RCA.

Skills

Programming languages: Java, C++, C#,

Code comprehension

Troubleshooting

OS concepts

Networking basics

Logs & traces

Performance profiling

Performance testing

Concurrency issues

Test result analysis

Analytical reasoning

Job description

What you will do

• Investigate complex and ambiguous software failures and performance problems.
• Perform deep root-cause analysis across application, system, network, database, and infrastructure layers.
• Analyze application logs, system logs, stack traces, thread dumps, heap dumps, metrics, traces, and profiling data.
• Analyze network traffic and protocols to identify latency, connectivity, retransmission, timeout, and communication issues.
• Investigate issues that occur only under specific workloads, concurrency levels, configurations, environments, or long-running conditions.
• Understand product architecture and critical customer workflows deeply enough to reason about failure modes.
• Learn the product in depth, including core workflows, customer usage patterns, deployment models, and performance-sensitive areas.
• Design experiments to isolate variables and prove or disprove hypotheses.
• Develop diagnostic scripts, instrumentation, and small tools when necessary to accelerate investigations.
• Perform exploratory testing and deliberately challenge system assumptions to discover weaknesses and failure modes.
• Investigate performance degradation, scalability limitations, resource exhaustion, latency spikes, and throughput bottlenecks.
• Create meaningful Performance Test Cases based on product architecture, customer workflows, expected load patterns, scalability goals, and known risk areas.
• Review Performance Test Cases created by other engineers to ensure coverage, clarity, workload relevance, data validity, and alignment with product behavior.
• Execute Performance Test Cases, analyze results, identify bottlenecks or regressions, and communicate findings with clear evidence and recommended actions.
• Correlate evidence across multiple components of distributed systems.
• Work with developers to identify the actual root cause rather than simply identifying the component where the symptom appeared.
• Clearly communicate technical findings, evidence, root cause, impact, and recommended corrective actions.
• Build and maintain diagnostic knowledge, troubleshooting methodologies, and internal technical documentation.
• Mentor other engineers in systematic debugging and root-cause analysis.

Must-have qualifications

1. Technical

• 5+ years of software engineering, performance engineering, systems engineering, reliability engineering, production troubleshooting, or a closely related discipline, preferably in a product-based software company.
• Programming/debugging ability in at least one major language such as Java, C++, C#, Python, etc.
• Strong ability to read and understand unfamiliar application code.
• Demonstrated experience troubleshooting complex software problems.
• Strong understanding of operating-system concepts: processes, threads, memory, CPU, file I/O, sockets, synchronization, resource utilization
• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS, DNS, connection management, latency, timeouts, retransmissions
• Experience analyzing logs and traces across multiple components.
• Experience with application profiling and/or performance analysis.
• Hands-on experience creating, reviewing, and executing Performance Test Cases for complex software products.
• Experience diagnosing concurrency, latency, resource contention, or scalability issues.
• Ability to interpret performance test results, compare them with baselines, identify regressions, and connect findings back to product behavior or code-level causes.
• Ability to formulate hypotheses and systematically validate them with evidence.

2. Behavioral

• Exceptional curiosity about how software systems work.
• Strong interest in learning the product deeply rather than treating testing as a black-box activity.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Comfortable working with incomplete or ambiguous information.
• Willingness to challenge assumptions.
• Persistence when the first explanation isn't the real root cause.
• Ability to communicate complex technical findings clearly.
• Comfortable collaborating with developers without simply handing problems back to them.
• Strong ownership of difficult investigations