Chip on cord

Chip

Senior QA Engineer Performance & Scalability

External position
Remote anywhere
Hiring internally for Chip?
FinTech
The savings and investments app of the future.
Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
a week ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: QA Automation Tester
Experience level: Senior
Core skills considered: Agile, CI/CD, Automated Testing
Other skills considered: Docker, Typescript

Logistics

Base salary: £60K - £70K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Remote
Work from: Anywhere
Working Timezones: (UTC) London +/- 2 hours
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We're looking for a Senior QA Engineer, Performance & Scalability who doesn't wait to be told what to test. You'll own performance and scalability across our platform, 30+ microservices, event-driven flows, and the legacy dependencies that come with a real production system at scale. This isn't a "run a load test before release" role. This is a role where you make performance a first-class concern from day one, where you define the thresholds that decide pass or fail, and where you hold the bar when something is degrading and nobody yet knows why.

You'll be the performance voice in every room you walk into, design discussions, architecture reviews, incident retrospectives. When latency spikes, you're already halfway through the trace. When a new service is being scoped, performance is already in the delivery plan because you put it there.


What you can expect to be doing:

  • Own Performance from Day One - You embed performance thinking into the delivery plan before code is written, not as an afterthought before release. You make performance testing a natural part of how teams build and ship - not a gate they hit at the end.
  • Define What Good Looks Like - You own the thresholds, metrics, and SLOs that govern pass or fail. You decide what a breach means, you set the budgets (latency, error rate, throughput), and you make those signals objective enough that a pipeline can act on them without a human reading graphs.
  • Test Services in Isolation, at Production Scale - You design and build performance tests for individual services, stubbing downstream and third-party dependencies so each journey is tested on its own merits. You map load to real production traffic to find where things bend and where they break.
  • Lead Performance in CI - You integrate performance testing into CI/CD so regressions are caught automatically, early, and fast. You own the fail-fast signals and keep them trustworthy.
  • Build Reusable, Scalable Assets - You build performance tests as code, reusable components, templates, and utilities that scale across teams and services. You handle data seeding and test setup so runs are repeatable and realistic.
  • Diagnose, Don't Just Report - You root-cause regressions across the stack, reading logs and tracing requests through distributed systems to find the source yourself rather than waiting for someone to hand it to you.
  • Reach Out and Drive Outcomes - You engage the right stakeholders, engineering, platform, product - to turn findings into fixes. You don't file a report and walk away; you drive the outcome.
  • Influence Decisions - You raise performance and scalability risks early, challenge assumptions constructively, and bring people with you. When a design won't scale, you say so before it ships.

What we're looking for:

  • 5+ years in performance engineering, with a track record of owning performance across complex, modern systems, not just executing someone else's load test.
  • Deep performance testing expertise. Hands-on experience designing realistic load models, running load, stress, soak and spike tests, and interpreting results meaningfully.
  • K6 or similar - You have real, hands-on depth with k6 for building and running performance tests.
  • Monitoring and observability know-how. You're comfortable with tools like Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch or similar, and you use them proactively to correlate test results with what the system is actually doing, not just when something is already on fire.
  • Strong programming ability. You're extremely strong in at least one language. We use TypeScript across our stack; if your fundamentals are solid in another language, we're confident you'll pick it up fast.
  • Microservices and distributed systems. You understand service-oriented architectures, dependencies, and the realities of testing a service in isolation - stubbing, mocking, contract boundaries, as well as end-to-end.
  • CI/CD fluency - You've integrated performance testing into CI/CD pipelines and understand how to keep feedback fast and signals reliable. Experience with AWS infrastructure is strongly preferred.
  • Strong communication and presence. You participate fully in agile ceremonies and cross-team conversations. You don't sit quietly when something needs to be said.

Nice to Have

  • Experience in fintech, wealth management, or regulated financial services.
  • Experience using AI-assisted tooling to accelerate performance work.
  • Contributions to internal quality guilds, communities of practice, or engineering culture initiatives.
  • Experience mentoring engineers on performance and testing best practices.

What we're really looking for:

Beyond the skills and the experience, we want someone who operates with ownership and independence. You don't wait for permission to improve something. You see a gap in coverage, a flaky test, a missing dashboard - and you fix it. You treat the Wealth Management experience line as yours, and you hold yourself to the same standard you hold the product to.

You're not a gatekeeper. You're a quality enabler. And you make every team you work with better at shipping reliable software.

Company Benefits

  • Discretionary share option bonus every 6 months
  • Workplace pension scheme (Employer: 3% / Employee: 4% / Tax Relief: 1% / Total: 8%)
  • We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity
  • Flexible working arrangements
  • Unlimited holiday (policy not to count)
  • £1500 Annual Chip Scholarship fund to support your personal development
  • MacBook Pro or similar
Senior QA Engineer Performance & Scalability at Chip
Position posted a week ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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