Principal Quality Engineer (Performance Engineering Architect)

About the role
We are looking for a Principal Quality Engineer (Performance Engineering Architect) to join us in Bengaluru. 

As part of our Platform Quality Engineering group, you will own the strategy, architecture and hands-on delivery of our company-wide performance testing capability. You will build and scale the performance test suite across EquiLend’s key products, helping teams make performance measurable, repeatable and part of release readiness. 

This is a senior individual-contributor role for someone who can define the programme and write the code. You will design frameworks, load scenarios, CI/CD integration, dashboards and standards that product teams can adopt consistently. You will partner with Quality Engineering, Product Engineering, SRE and Release Management to identify performance risk early, improve delivery confidence and support reliable platform growth. 

What you’ll do 

• Define the end-to-end performance engineering strategy, including load, stress, spike and capacity testing across key products.  
• Establish how performance environments, test data, SLAs, SLOs and release gates should be used to support release readiness.  
• Create standards and patterns for performance tests, including structure, tagging, baselines, thresholds and reporting.  
• Design a scalable performance test suite architecture with reusable workloads, safe non-production execution and clear ownership by product or journey.  
• Prioritise coverage based on risk, including critical user flows, high-volume APIs, latency-sensitive paths and large-data UI scenarios.  
• Implement and maintain the core performance framework and tooling using k6, Gatling, JMeter or equivalent tools.  
• Author and review scripts, scenarios and harness code to support reliable and repeatable performance testing.  
• Build shared libraries for authentication, payloads, correlation, assertions and reusable performance testing patterns.  
• Integrate performance tests into CI/CD pipelines with reliable metrics, reports and execution artefacts.  
• Build dashboards and reporting views that show trends, regressions and release-readiness status.  
• Run capacity and scalability validation using realistic load profiles, ramp strategies, soak tests and spike scenarios.  
• Partner with engineering teams to profile, reproduce and resolve bottlenecks, using logs, metrics and tracing to support root-cause analysis.  
• Coach Quality Engineering and development teams on writing, maintaining and interpreting performance tests.  
• Document playbooks and run guilds or office hours to improve adoption of performance engineering practices.  
• Align with stakeholders on test environments, infrastructure requirements and the cost of large-scale performance runs.  
• Own performance release-readiness criteria, including pass and fail rules, waivers and defect tracking.  
• Maintain a performance test catalogue mapped to products, journeys and risk areas.  
• Manage baselines and regression detection, reducing flakiness through stable workloads and good environment hygiene.  

What we’re looking for 

• 12+ years’ experience in software engineering, quality engineering, SRE or a comparable role, including significant experience in performance, load testing or production-scale systems.  
• Deep experience with at least one major load-testing stack, such as k6, Gatling, JMeter or an equivalent tool.  
• Strong scripting or programming experience using Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python or a comparable language.  
• Proven experience integrating performance tests into CI/CD pipelines.  
• Strong working knowledge of performance metrics, logs, traces and dashboards.  
• Track record of architecting multi-product performance engineering programmes while still contributing code, scripts and pipelines hands-on.  
• Experience building shared quality engineering, platform engineering or performance testing capabilities across multiple teams.  
• Strong understanding of load profiles, capacity testing, baseline management, regression detection and release-readiness criteria.  
• Ability to work with engineering teams to investigate bottlenecks and support root-cause analysis. 
• Clear communication skills, with the ability to explain performance risk and technical findings to engineering teams and leadership.  
• Good analytical and problem-solving skills, with attention to detail and a structured approach to complex technical issues.  
• Working knowledge of Agile or Scrum delivery practices.  
• Financial services industry experience is preferred.  

Why EquiLend? 

• Be recognised for your contribution through a discretionary annual cash bonus, linked to individual and company performance.  
• Work flexibly with up to 100 remote working days per calendar year.  
• Take time to recharge with generous annual leave, plus public holidays.  
• Access comprehensive health insurance for you and your dependents from your first day.  
• Receive personal accident insurance from the start of your employment.  
• Connect with colleagues at an annual company-sponsored team retreat, hosted at a new location each year.  
• If relocating from more than 40 miles away, receive hotel accommodation and travel ticket reimbursement.