Principal Performance Engineer - Fintech

🚀 Principal Performance Engineer I – Fast‑Growth Fintech

£90,000 + 7% bonus · Fully Remote (UK only – permanent right to work required)

We are hiring for one of the UK’s fastest‑growing fintech’s, scaling a high‑throughput payments platform that demands world‑class performance engineering. This is a rare chance to build a performance function from the ground up and own strategy, tooling, and environment design.

If you love getting into the guts of distributed systems, modelling real traffic, and uncovering root causes, this is your next big step.

🌟 Why this role?

• Greenfield performance engineering function
• Full ownership of strategy, architecture, and execution
• Design replica production environments from scratch
• High visibility with engineering leaders & architects
• Influence a mission‑critical payments platform processing millions of transactions

🔍 What You’ll Do

• Define and lead the performance testing strategy across a hybrid on‑prem + cloud estate
• Architect dedicated replica production environments (infra, data, traffic modelling)
• Integrate performance testing deeply into CI/CD (shift‑left focus)
• Diagnose bottlenecks across APIs, services, and databases at scale
• Model real production traffic and translate findings into business impact
• Coach engineers and uplift performance capability across teams

🧠 What You Bring

• 8–10 years enterprise performance testing
• 5+ years in a lead/principal role
• Experience building performance practices and replica environments
• Strong database performance experience (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MSSQL)
• Deep experience performance‑testing APIs, services, and high‑volume systems

Browse our curated collection of remote jobs across all categories and industries, featuring positions from top companies worldwide.

• Hands‑on with Locust, JMeter, K6, Blazemeter
• Able to define NFRs and influence architecture early

✅ Strong Signals You are a Fit

• You have built performance frameworks, not just run scripts
• Can describe an environment you designed end‑to‑end
• Payments / fintech / high‑transaction‑volume experience
• Know exactly when to use load vs stress vs spike vs soak testing

❌ Will not be a right if:

• You have only done front‑end performance
• No database performance testing
• You have only executed scripts, never designed strategy
• You rely on NFRs written by others