About the role

As a Performance Tester, you will make an impact by driving performance quality and reliability across enterprise-scale applications, ensuring systems meet critical business and customer performance expectations. You will be a valued member of the Quality Engineering team and work collaboratively with development, operations, architecture, and product teams.

In this role, you will:

• Lead end-to-end Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) gathering and own KPI/SLA definition and validation, working directly with business, architecture, and engineering stakeholders to set measurable, realistic performance targets (response time, throughput, concurrency, scalability, availability) aligned to business-critical transactions.
• Design and execute comprehensive performance test strategies - load, stress, soak/endurance, spike, and scalability testing - using tools such as Gatling (primary), JMeter, LoadRunner, and K6, tailored to application architecture and business risk.
• Build workload models from production traffic analysis, business volumetrics, and peak-usage forecasting, and author performance test plans, strategy documents, and estimation models that translate business requirements into actionable technical approaches.
• Configure and maintain performance monitoring and alerting (Dynatrace, Splunk, New Relic), and integrate performance testing into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab, Bamboo) to enable continuous performance quality engineering, including shift-left scripting and automation frameworks.
• Own accountability for performance sign-off - presenting NFR compliance status, risks, and recommendations to senior stakeholders - while collaborating closely with development, operations, and product teams throughout the SDLC.

Work model: We believe hybrid work is the way forward as we strive to provide flexibility wherever possible. Based on this role's business requirements, this is a hybrid position in a client or Cognizant office in Sydney, NSW. Regardless of your working arrangement, we are here to support a healthy work-life balance through our various wellbeing programs.

What you need to have to be considered

• Demonstrated experience in Performance Testing / Performance Engineering, with a track record of driving performance quality across enterprise-scale applications
• Expert-level experience designing and executing load, stress, soak, spike, and scalability tests using Gatling (primary), JMeter, LoadRunner, and K6
• Hands-on experience with performance monitoring and alerting tools, including Dynatrace, Splunk, and New Relic
• Expert-level capability in cloud-based performance testing and monitoring across cloud-native and hybrid environments
• Experience integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab, Bamboo) and building automation frameworks for shift-left, early-bottleneck detection

These will help you stand out

• Basic scripting ability in Java, JavaScript, or Python
• Strong presentation, interpersonal, and stakeholder/customer communication skills, with the ability to translate complex technical findings for both technical and non-technical audiences

We're excited to meet people who share our mission and can make an impact in a variety of ways. Don't hesitate to apply, even if you only meet the minimum requirements listed. Think about your transferable experiences and unique skills that make you stand out as someone who can bring new and exciting things to this role.