Senior Performance Engineer

EPAM Systems; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

EPAM Systems Inc. is seeking a Senior Performance Engineer to define, implement, and execute a comprehensive performance engineering strategy across applications and services. You will validate NFRs, analyze bottlenecks, and drive automated performance testing within cross-functional teams.

You will design load, stress, and capacity tests for web apps, APIs, and backend services, and integrate tests into CI/CD pipelines. Strong tooling skills and AWS scalability awareness are required.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of performance testing/engineering on production web applications and distributed systems.
• Experience with k6, JMeter, Gatling.
• Familiarity with Locust or similar load testing tools.
• Strong understanding of load, stress, and spike testing.
• English proficiency at an Upper-Intermediate level (B2) or higher.

Responsibilities

• Define the overall performance testing and performance engineering strategy based on application architecture, business usage patterns, and NFRs.
• Translate NFRs into measurable performance acceptance criteria, test scenarios, workload models, and success thresholds.
• Design and execute load, stress, spike, endurance/soak, scalability, and capacity tests across web applications, APIs, and backend services.
• Develop and maintain automated performance test scripts and reusable performance testing frameworks.
• Test the performance of HTTP/REST and gRPC-based APIs and services.
• Establish workload models based on expected user volumes, concurrency, and production-like behavior.
• Analyze performance across the full application stack including frontend, APIs, databases, and infrastructure.
• Identify bottlenecks and perform root-cause analysis using observability data.
• Validate application behavior under normal, peak, and sustained workloads.
• Evaluate KPIs such as response time, latency, throughput, error rate, concurrency, CPU, memory, network utilization, and DB performance.
• Integrate performance tests into CI/CD pipelines to support continuous validation and detect regressions.
• Establish baselines and track performance trends across releases.
• Partner with engineers to optimize performance and scalability.
• Produce clear performance test reports and communicate release criteria compliance.

Skills

Performance testing

CI/CD

Load testing

API performance

Tools

k6

JMeter

Gatling

Locust

Job description

We are seeking a Senior Performance Engineer to define, implement, and execute the performance engineering strategy for our applications and supporting services. This role will be key to validating Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) , including response time, throughput, scalability, stability, and resource utilization. The engineer will work closely with development, DevSecOps, architecture, and product teams to identify performance risks early, build automated performance testing capabilities, analyze system behavior under realistic workloads, and ensure applications meet agreed performance and scalability targets before production release.

Responsibilities

• Define the overall performance testing and performance engineering strategy based on application architecture, business usage patterns, and NFRs
• Translate business and technical NFRs into measurable performance acceptance criteria, test scenarios, workload models, and success thresholds
• Design and execute load, stress, spike, endurance/soak, scalability, and capacity tests across web applications, APIs, and backend services
• Develop and maintain automated performance test scripts and reusable performance testing frameworks
• Test the performance of HTTP/REST and gRPC-based APIs and services
• Establish realistic workload models based on expected user volumes, concurrency, transaction patterns, and production-like behavior
• Analyze performance across the full application stack, including frontend, APIs, services, databases, caching layers, infrastructure, and third-party dependencies
• Identify performance bottlenecks and conduct root-cause analysis using application, infrastructure, database, and observability data
• Validate application behavior under normal, peak, and sustained workloads
• Evaluate key performance indicators such as response time, latency, throughput, error rate, concurrency, CPU, memory, network utilization, and database performance
• Integrate performance tests into CI/CD pipelines to support continuous performance validation and detect regressions early
• Establish performance baselines and track performance trends across releases
• Partner with software engineers and DevSecOps teams to recommend and validate performance optimizations
• Produce clear performance test reports, identify risks, and communicate whether agreed NFRs and release criteria have been met
• Support capacity planning and provide recommendations for application and AWS infrastructure scalability

Requirements

• 3+ years of performance testing/performance engineering experience with production web applications and distributed systems
• Proficiency in performance testing tools such as k6, JMeter, and Gatling
• Familiarity with Locust or similar load testing tools
• Strong understanding of load, stress, and spike testing
• Expertise in endurance/soak, scalability, and capacity testing
• English proficiency at an Upper-Intermediate level (B2) or higher