Lead Performance QA Engineer

ABOUT US
Xsolla is a global commerce company with robust tools and services to help developers solve the inherent challenges of the video game industry. From indie to AAA, companies partner with Xsolla to help them fund, distribute, market, and monetize their games. Grounded in the belief in the future of video games, Xsolla is resolute in the mission to bring opportunities together, and continually make new resources available to creators. Headquartered and incorporated in Los Angeles, California, Xsolla operates as the merchant of record and has helped over 1,500+ game developers to reach more players and grow their businesses around the world. With more paths to profits and ways to win, developers have all the things needed to enjoy the game.
For more information, visit xsolla.com.

Lead Performance Tester (IC Leadership Role)
Team: Quality Engineering & Platform Reliability
Location: Hybrid(Montreal)
Seniority: Individual Contributor Lead

About the Role
Xsolla powers global commerce for the gaming industry — a platform that processes massive transaction volumes, complex integrations, and millisecond-sensitive interactions.
We’re seeking a Lead Performance Tester to define, execute, and institutionalize performance testing across this landscape.
This is a hands-on, technically deep individual contributor leadership role. You’ll architect and drive performance testing strategies, craft sophisticated test harnesses, and author the Performance Testing Runbook that sets the gold standard for all future testing efforts.
If you thrive in environments where every number tells a story — latency, throughput, resource contention, and scaling curves — this is your stage.
Core Responsibility
Architect and lead enterprise-grade performance testing frameworks across multiple distributed systems, APIs, SDKs, and service integrations.
Design, execute, and interpret performance, load, soak, and stress tests that simulate real-world concurrency and traffic behaviors.
Build reusable performance harnesses using modern tools such as JMeter, k6, Gatling, Locust, or LoadRunner Enterprise, and integrate them into CI/CD pipelines.
Author and maintain the Performance Testing Runbook — a detailed operational guide covering environment setup, load profiles, KPIs, and performance sign-off criteria.
Instrument systems for observability, leveraging APM and monitoring tools (Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, Open Telemetry) to trace and correlate test results with backend telemetry.
Perform deep-dive bottleneck analysis at every layer of the stack — network, API, cache, database, and compute — identifying contention, saturation points, and tuning opportunities.
Work directly with backend, DevOps, and SRE teams to benchmark system capacity, analyze regressions, and validate optimization hypotheses.
Integrate performance metrics into CI/CD, enforcing data-driven go/no-go gates and providing clear visual reports on trend lines and performance drift.
Mentor and influence QA, automation, and infrastructure engineers in the art and science of performance engineering.
Required Technical Skills & Expertise
8+ years of hands-on experience in performance, load, and scalability testing for large-scale or enterprise-grade systems.
Advanced proficiency with multiple performance testing tools, including:
JMeter, k6, Gatling, LoadRunner Enterprise, Locust, NeoLoad, or BlazeMeter.
Expertise in test scripting and automation using Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Groovy.
Deep understanding of distributed architectures — microservices, APIs, message queues, and async processing.
Proficiency with profiling and analysis tools (YourKit, JProfiler, VisualVM, Chrome DevTools, perf, flame graphs).
Proven ability to correlate and interpret metrics from APM platforms (Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, AppDynamics) and system monitors (Grafana, Prometheus, CloudWatch).
Solid grasp of network and infrastructure fundamentals: TCP/IP, HTTP/2, CDN behavior, caching, load balancing, and service mesh patterns.
Experience defining SLAs, SLOs, and performance baselines, and embedding them into pipelines as measurable quality gates.
Strong analytical mindset — able to turn high-volume telemetry data into clear narratives, actionable insights, and capacity forecasts.
Git proficiency and familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or CircleCI).
Preferred / Bonus Experience
Familiarity with containerized and cloud-native performance testing (Kubernetes, Docker, AWS Fargate, GCP GKE).
Experience with chaos engineering or resilience testing frameworks (Gremlin, Litmus, ChaosMesh).
Understanding of database performance tuning and query profiling (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB).
Knowledge of API gateway performance behavior (Kong, NGINX, AWS API Gateway).
Prior experience authoring or maintaining enterprise performance frameworks or internal testing platforms.
Contributions to open-source or internal performance engineering playbooks, documentation, or frameworks.
What Success Looks Like
A Performance Testing Runbook that becomes the canonical guide for all future load and scalability testing at Xsolla.
Continuous, automated performance baselines integrated into the build/release pipelines.
Systemic visibility into performance regressions and bottlenecks across services.
A quantifiable performance improvement culture, where every release is measured and optimized, not guessed.
Clear, data-backed recommendations that drive architectural improvements and product reliability.

BENEFITS:
Convenient work tools
Latest Mac workplaces + additional hardware to make you more effective at work
Google Chat, Gmail, Google Drive, Confluence, Jira, GitLab.

Professional growth
Free trainings and participation in specialized conferences.
Rich knowledge exchange within the company.

More perks
Health insurance (Medical, dental and optical)- Employee and dependents
Flexible hours: organize your day according to your needs and sprint & teamwork demands
No dress code
Comfortable and new office environment
The duties of this position may change from time to time so the individual and organization can achieve their results. This job description is intended to describe the general level of work being performed. It is not intended to be all-inclusive. By submitting your application, you consent to Xsolla conducting background checks, where permitted by law, after the final interview stage. All checks will comply with local regulations, and your information will be handled confidentially. Xsolla KL Sdn Bhd takes your privacy very seriously, and will not sell or externally distribute any data received during the hiring process. Pursuant to the Personal Data Protection Act 2010 (“PDPA”), Xsolla KL Sdn Bhd is mindful and committed to the protection of your personal information and your privacy. Please direct any inquiries regarding your data privacy to [email protected].
For more vacancies: Careers | Xsolla