Principal Performance Engineer - Fully Remote NI | Remote | Full-Time At a glance Principal-level role building and leading a new Performance Testing function * Design and implement enterprise-scale performance strategy across a global payments platform * Hands-on leadership working with Engineering, DevOps and TechOps teams * Up to £90k salary plus bonus The Company Ocho is proud to partner exclusively with a fast-growing payments technology company building the next generation of capabilities. Their mission is simple but ambitious: deliver scalable, high-performance platforms that power real-world commerce globally. With continued growth and strategic investment in engineering, They're expanding its technology leadership and investing heavily in platform reliability, scalability and observability. This role offers a rare opportunity to build a performance engineering capability from the ground up, shaping how performance testing is designed, executed, and embedded across the entire engineering organisation. The Role As Principal Performance Engineer, you will take ownership of designing and implementing end-to-end performance engineering strategy. Working closely with engineering leadership, DevOps and platform teams, you will design performance testing environments, load models and testing frameworks that mirror real-world production traffic. Your work will ensure platforms scale reliably as transaction volumes grow globally. This is a highly visible role with real technical influence. You will define performance testing standards, introduce modern tools and methodologies, and help embed a shift-left performance mindset across engineering teams. There is also potential to build and lead a specialist performance engineering team as the function grows. Key Responsibilities Define and implement the organisation-wide performance testing strategy * Architect and build replica production performance environments * Design and execute load, stress and soak testing across platforms and APIs * Partner with engineering teams to embed performance testing across the SDLC * Analyse performance results and identify bottlenecks, scaling risks and optimisation opportunities * Ensure applications are properly instrumented for metrics, tracing and observability * Lead performance governance including benchmarking, drift detection and SLA validation * Provide technical leadership and mentorship across engineering teams Ideal Candidate 8 years experience in performance testing role * Hands-on experience with tools such as K6, Locust, JMeter, Blazemeter or similar * Experience testing APIs, web applications and distributed systems * Strong knowledge of database performance testing (PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Oracle etc.) * Experience designing production-like test environments * Strong understanding of DevOps, observability and cloud-native architectures * Ability to influence architecture decisions through performance insights and analysis Why This Role? This is a unique opportunity to build and shape a performance engineering function at a global company. You'll work with modern technology, influence engineering strategy, and help ensure the platform continues to scale as the business grows worldwide. What's on Offer? Salary up to £90k plus annual bonus * Fully remote working (Europe wide with some exceptions) * Industry-leading benefits package * A modern, product-led engineering culture built on autonomy, trust, and technical excellence To apply, connect with Neill Ferguson on LinkedIn or submit your CV via the link below. Skills: performance devops testing qa jmeter k6 Benefits: Work From Home