About Unilink
Unilink Software is a fast-growing, international company and the leading provider of innovative, award-winning software solutions for the criminal justice sector. Our mission is to empower governments and businesses around the world to effectively secure their operating environments, intuitively manage their data, become more efficient, and foster a culture of rehabilitation.
Our purpose is to create technologies that people can rely on so that justice systems work well. We foster a culture of continuous improvement, innovation and excellence. We care about our staff, our customers, the environment and everything we do - principles encompassed in our social purpose statement.
We work with fantastic customers - government and private sector organisations in the UK, Europe and Australia - who use our software solutions to reduce the administrative burden on staff, improve the information flow and security as well as to implement digital solutions to assist in rehabilitation of people in their care.
We are growing quickly, expect that growth to accelerate and are looking for enthusiastic, passionate and driven individuals to join our team. Our offices are located in London, Southampton and Newcastle but our staff are located throughout the UK, in Europe and Australia. We offer flexible working, a good benefits package and competitive salary.
Performance Tester
Remote
About the role
We are looking for a Performance Tester to become the organisation’s expert and owner of performance testing strategy. As our sole performance specialist, you’ll work embedded within our development squads, helping shape how we design, test, monitor, and future-proof the performance of our applications.
You will bring strong technical insight, be confident offering new ideas, challenge assumptions, and drive best practices across teams. This is an opportunity to build a performance function almost from the ground up.
Responsibilities & Duties
Performance Testing & Engineering
* Design, develop, and maintain performance, load, stress, scalability, and endurance test suites.
* Define performance thresholds, KPIs, and acceptance criteria for applications and APIs.
* Execute performance test cycles and analyse results, identifying bottlenecks and areas for optimisation.
* Work with teams to integrate performance testing into CI/CD pipelines.
Tooling & Framework Leadership
* Use and enhance our existing tooling (currently Playwright; exploring k6).
* Recommend and introduce new performance testing technologies, frameworks, and methodologies where beneficial.
* Build reusable performance test frameworks and best-practice guidelines for squads.
Collaboration & Influence
* Collaborate closely with developers, architects, DevOps, and QA engineers.
* Act as the performance subject-matter expert (SME) within squads.
* Lead performance-related discussions and drive a culture of performance awareness.
* Provide clear, actionable feedback and guidance based on test outcomes.
Monitoring & Continuous Improvement
* Work with DevOps and engineering to implement real-time performance monitoring and alerting.
* Conduct root-cause analysis for performance issues in production and pre-production environments.
* Continuously evaluate and refine our performance testing strategy to support scale.
Qualifications, Competencies & Experience
Required Skills & Experience
* Hands-on experience with performance testing tools (e.g., k6, Gatling, JMeter, Locust, Playwright performance capabilities, etc.).
* Strong understanding of browser performance, API performance, and distributed systems.
* Skilled in scripting and test automation (JavaScript/TypeScript experience ideal).
* Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines and integrating performance tests into automated workflows.
* Experience analysing system metrics (CPU, memory, network, logs) to diagnose performance bottlenecks.
* Confident communicator able to influence teams and challenge established approaches constructively.