Senior Performance Engineer

Inspired Testing; Wes-Kaap; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

Inspired Testing is seeking an experienced Senior Performance Engineer to join a fast-paced gaming and betting environment. You will ensure high-volume platforms, APIs and services meet performance, scalability, and stability goals, especially during peak events.

Ideal candidates bring strong practical performance engineering experience, tool-agnostic mindset, and ability to collaborate with DevOps, Architecture and Infrastructure teams to optimize performance and enable CI/CD processes.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of practical performance testing/performance engineering experience.
• Experience with high-volume, customer-facing platforms and complex systems.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

• Define and implement performance testing strategies, approaches and plans.
• Translate business and technical requirements into realistic performance workloads and scenarios.
• Design, develop and execute load, stress, spike, endurance and scalability tests.
• Establish performance baselines, benchmarks and acceptance criteria.
• Test critical gaming and betting journeys under peak-load conditions.
• Identify performance bottlenecks across applications, APIs, databases and infrastructure.
• Analyse results and provide clear technical and business recommendations.
• Collaborate with Development, Architecture, Infrastructure and DevOps teams to support root-cause analysis and performance optimisation.
• Support capacity planning and scalability assessments.
• Identify performance risks early and promote shift-left performance engineering.
• Support integration of performance testing into CI/CD and continuous-testing processes.
• Provide clear performance reporting to stakeholders.
• Mentor and support other engineers.

Skills

Performance testing

Load testing

API performance

CI/CD

Agile delivery

Root-cause analysis

Monitoring

Cloud architectures

REST APIs

NeoLoad

OctoPerf

Tools

NeoLoad

OctoPerf

Job description

We are looking for an experienced Senior Performance Engineer to work within a fast-paced gaming and betting environment.

The role will focus on ensuring that high-volume, customer-facing platforms, APIs and supporting services meet performance, scalability and stability requirements, particularly during peak sporting events and periods of high customer activity.

The successful candidate must have strong practical performance engineering experience and be comfortable working across different tools and technologies. Experience with NeoLoad and/or OctoPerf will be advantageous, but the candidate must be tool-agnostic and adaptable.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and implement performance testing strategies, approaches and plans.
• Translate business and technical requirements into realistic performance workloads and scenarios.
• Design, develop and execute load, stress, spike, endurance and scalability tests.
• Establish performance baselines, benchmarks and acceptance criteria.
• Test critical gaming and betting journeys under realistic and peak-load conditions.
• Identify performance bottlenecks across applications, APIs, integrations, databases and infrastructure.
• Analyse results and provide clear technical and business recommendations.
• Collaborate with Development, Architecture, Infrastructure and DevOps teams to support root-cause analysis and performance optimisation.
• Support capacity planning and scalability assessments.
• Identify performance risks early and promote shift-left performance engineering.
• Support the integration of performance testing into CI/CD and continuous-testing processes.
• Provide clear performance reporting to technical and senior business stakeholders.
• Mentor and support other engineers where required.

Gaming & Betting Experience

The candidate should understand, or be able to quickly adapt to, the performance demands of high-volume gaming and betting platforms, including:

• High and unpredictable concurrent-user volumes.
• Significant traffic spikes around major sporting events and promotions.
• Real-time betting and financial transactions.
• Betting placement, confirmation and odds/pricing updates.
• Customer authentication and account management.
• Deposits, withdrawals and payment integrations.
• Third-party gaming and betting integrations.
• Mobile, web, API and microservices performance.
• The impact of platform performance and availability on customer experience and revenue.

Experience within gaming and betting is highly advantageous. Experience in other high-volume transactional industries such as financial services, e-commerce, payments or telecommunications will also be considered.

Technical Skills

Strong practical knowledge of:

• Performance, load, stress, spike, endurance and scalability testing.
• Workload modelling and performance benchmarking.
• Performance monitoring and root-cause analysis.
• Application, API, database and infrastructure performance.
• REST APIs and web services.
• APM, monitoring and observability tools.
• CI/CD and Agile delivery environments.
• Cloud and distributed architectures.
• Performance metrics including response time, throughput, concurrency, transaction rates, error rates and resource utilisation.
• Experience with NeoLoad and/or OctoPerf is beneficial; however, flexibility across performance testing tools is essential.

Experience & Competencies

• 5+ years of practical performance testing/performance engineering experience with demonstrated senior-level capability.
• Experience working with complex, high-volume, customer-facing digital platforms.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to operate independently and take ownership of performance initiatives.
• Comfortable working within a fast-paced Agile environment.
• Strong communication skills across technical and business stakeholders.
• Ability to translate complex performance findings into clear business risks and recommendations.
• Proactive, pragmatic and focused on business outcomes.

Success in the Role

Success will be measured by the ability to identify performance risks early, provide confidence that critical platforms can support expected and peak customer demand, and help progressively strengthen its overall performance engineering capability.