Performance Engineer

This role can be based out of our London or Leicester offices. We operate a hybrid working policy.

Home. There’s no place like it. And there’s no feeling like helping people create the joy of feeling truly at home.

At Dunelm, that’s what we do.

We’re the UK’s number one choice for homewares because we make home life lovelier for our customers. And the caring and supportive culture we’ve created makes this a place you’ll feel right at home too.

Quality Chapter

You might not think it, but remaining the first choice for savvy homeware-shoppers involves some pretty advanced tech. We’ve recently made our whole company serverless, making us the largest user of AWS Lambdas in Europe (second in the world), and we’re bringing more and more tech into our stores.

As a Quality Chapter at Dunelm, our aim is to enable and support our ability to deliver high quality value, in the right way, based on our customer needs. With a focus on having the right balance of speed and quality to frequently achieve this.

To be able succeed our Quality Chapter is made up of 60+ quality advocates (QAs), in various roles, embedded into our 20+ crews and across our 6 domains to enable & implement continuous quality & testing through whole team ownership.

Performance Engineering Team

Dunelm is committed to ensure the best customer and colleague experience. Hence performance of the real time systems like e-commerce websites and Point of Sale are critical. Being part of our performance engineering team, you will directly protect and improve customer and colleague experience by evolving validation and performance management in Technology function.

We are focused on our vision that is “To help improve customer and colleague experience by having optimum time critical operations and high confidence in system availability.” We thrive to achieve our mission that is “We innovate, support and enable the platform and the technology squads to deliver an efficient, scalable, total retail system “.

We are on a continuous journey of achieving good page experience signal (Google) and peak readiness (scalability) for critical tech.

What You’ll Be Doing

As a key individual contributor of the Performance Engineering team, you will work within the team and with the business-aligned crews where your primary focus will be to implement testing strategies, provide consultation & support to the development squads and collaborate to achieve peak readiness from scalability perspective. You will work with other performance engineers and development squads in required focus area collaboratively to deliver highly performant outcomes to our customers.

You will be focused on evolution and maintenance of our performance engineering lifecycle i.e. front-end/back-end performance audits and performance test automation in software delivery life cycle (SDLC). You will be hands on in the design, maintenance, adoption of the performance test frameworks and performance management techniques.

What You’ll Do

• Benchmarking: Define the metrics for system’s scalability, implement performance observability, curate a process to validate and improve these metrics in SDLC through collaboration with other chapters and wider business.
• Tooling & Automation: Design and implement robust testing frameworks focused on enabling test first practices and providing right feedback at right time. Maintain and evolve the in-house tooling for web application and API load testing that is fit for the whole Dunelm’s technology function.
• Performance Optimisation: Conduct in-depth performance audits and identify bottlenecks in our back-end code, network and infrastructure.
• Collaboration: Work closely with developers, site reliability/operation engineers and platform/infrastructure engineers to ensure that scalability is a priority throughout the development process.
• Training & Mentorship: Provide guidance and mentorship on scalability management best practices and high-level optimisation techniques during pre-deployment and post-deployment stages.
• Research and Innovations: Stay up to date with the latest trends and technologies in scalability management and explore new opportunities for improvement.
• Outcome Support & Consultation: Provide consultation or support development/platform outcomes on scalability management and scalability validation tooling.

Essential Skills

• Performance Testing Life Cycle: Deep understanding of Performance Testing Life Cycle and how performance can be embedded in Software Development Life Cycle.
• Web Application Load Testing: Subject matter expert in front end automation techniques and how test scripts can be designed to simulate real life scenarios during peak period.
• API Load Testing: Subject matter expert in API load testing techniques to develop highly scalable APIs while balancing with the cost of running them.
• Testing Techniques: Expert in various load testing techniques and when to apply them based on the business need.
• Cloud Technologies: Strong skills in AWS or GCP cloud technologies to build test solutions and to understand the performance trade-off with various options.
• Continuous Delivery: Strong skills in CI/CD tools and understanding of continuous delivery to embed scalability management in the application pipelines.
• Design And Architecture: Good understanding of interpreting design and architecture diagram to achieve optimal performance through this process.
• Performance Optimisation Techniques: Good at root cause analysis and identifying opportunities to optimise the performance.

Desirable Skills

• Retail Technology: Good understanding of retail technologies and the business processes in retail domains.
• Observability: Experience in monitoring and code profiling tools.
• AI Literacy: Understanding on how AI could be leveraged in performance engineering.
• Programming Principles: Understanding of programming principles and best practice (e.g., DRY, SOLID for creating re-usable code, best practice etc).
• Tools: K6 for Web API Load Testing, Artillery for Web Application Load Testing, Gitlab for CI/CD

Behaviours/Values

Our shared values of ‘act like owners’, ‘keep listening and learning’, ‘long term thinking’, and ‘stronger together’ help ensure we are always finding better ways of doing things and spending our time focusing on what’s important.

Leading Self:

As a Performance Engineer with us, you will be able to be your true self whilst seeking to build relationships and empathy with other members of your crew and chapter, to work as a team to take ownership of embedding quality into everything we deliver to our customer.

You will be empowered to take the lead on quality within your area of influence to coach and enable continuous improvements to quality and software engineering practices whilst maintaining long-term thinking to stay aligned to the future business and technology roadmap.

You will be given the freedom to be curious and ask questions to gather more understanding with a focus on the customer, whilst at the same time, be able to communicate clearly with others your own thoughts and ideas around quality and testing.

You will work within a psychologically safe environment to encourage you to innovate, think outside the box, adapt and experiment to try different things based on problems or challenges being presented.

Finally, you will be supported and presented with opportunities to develop yourself and your own growth mindset and desire to learn, will determine how far you choose to take those opportunities.

Dunelm is committed to becoming a fully inclusive business that is representative of our customers and locations. We recognise the value in diversity and welcome applications from all candidates regardless of sex, age, race, religion, ability, gender or sexual identity, socio-economic background or education. We are committed to making Dunelm a place where everyone can enjoy a successful career and have systems in place to support all our colleagues. We are seeking applications from candidates who share our values and celebrate diversity in all its forms.