Load Testing Engineer

Performance Test Engineer — Aether Cloud Solutions

Chicago, IL | August 2023 – Present

• Designed and executed 45+ distributed load and stress tests using Apache JMeter and k6 to validate application stability for a high-volume payment processing platform prior to peak sales season, simulating up to 120,000 concurrent users.
• Configured Prometheus and Grafana dashboards to monitor CPU, memory, and database connection pools during load runs, identifying 8 critical memory leaks and database deadlocks that improved post-release system reliability by 40%.
• Integrated automated performance testing suites into GitLab CI pipelines, reducing the deployment verification feedback loop from 6 hours to 45 minutes and ensuring early detection of response time regressions.
• Collaborated with DevOps and database administrators to tune database query execution paths and JVM parameters, achieving a 28% reduction in page-load latency and saving 15% in cloud infrastructure compute resources.

Software QA Automation Engineer — Novatech Retail Systems

Indianapolis, IN | June 2020 – July 2023

• Authored and maintained a library of 150+ modular load testing scripts using Locust and Postman, validating RESTful API endpoints against Service Level Agreements to keep average response latencies below 250 milliseconds.
• Executed weekly endurance and spike tests on microservices architecture, isolating a critical database connection leak that, once resolved, reduced error rate spikes by 34% during simulated client traffic surges.
• Constructed custom shell and Python automation scripts to parse, format, and upload performance test execution results, saving 6 hours of manual data extraction and report generation work for the engineering team per week.
• Assisted in generating monthly performance compliance reports for client stakeholders, demonstrating that new system builds met the strict 200ms response time requirement under a simulated 20,000-user load.

Performance testing, Load testing, Stress testing, Endurance testing, Spike testing, JMeter, k6, Locust, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, JVM tuning, SQL, Python, JavaScript, Shell scripting, REST APIs, gRPC

E-Commerce Black Friday Readiness

Role: Lead Performance Engineer

Tools: JMeter, AWS, Grafana, Jenkins, Dynatrace

Engineered load models simulating a 250% spike in traffic (up to 150,000 concurrent users), identifying auto-scaling bottlenecks and reducing response times by 30%.

CI/CD Performance Gate Integration

Role: Performance Automation Specialist

Tools: k6, GitHub Actions, Docker, Prometheus

Architected an automated testing gate running performance regression tests on pull requests, blocking changes that increase latency by over 10% and reducing regression bugs by 45%.

• ISTQB Certified Tester - Advanced Level Performance Testing (2023)
• k6 Certified Associate (2021)

• Languages: English (Native), German (Conversational)
• Professional Memberships: Association for Software Testing (AST)
• Availability: 2 weeks notice