Performance & Reliability Engineer/Architect

About the Position

At SPD Technology, we bring together a team of like-minded people who are driven by the desire to bring value through their work, united in their commitment to high performance and delivering custom, cutting-edge tech solutions that drive clients’ growth. We empower our people with a culture of excellence and enable them with the opportunity to uphold their accountability to contribute on each level. We value humanity and collaboration, encourage professional and personal growth, and foster a supportive and flexible work environment where everyone’s contribution is welcomed.

We are looking for a Performance & Reliability Engineer/Architect to join us as part of our team.

About the Role

We are looking for a Performance & Reliability Architect who can define and practically implement the non-functional testing and performance engineering approach across the product landscape.

This is an architect-level, hands-on individual contributor role focused on shaping cross-product performance and reliability strategy while working closely with engineering, Product, Architecture, DevOps/SRE, and QA teams.

The role covers defining and executing performance strategy for critical end-to-end flows, endpoints, APIs, and production-like scenarios; aligning non-functional requirements; supporting SLA/SLO-related validation; establishing quality gates and baselines; and improving the performance framework, observability, dashboards, and reporting.

This is not a direct people-management role, but it does require strong technical leadership, broad system-level thinking, and the ability to guide the overall performance and reliability approach across teams and products.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the performance and reliability strategy across products, with focus on critical E2E flows, endpoints, APIs, and production-like scenarios.
• Collaborate with performance engineers to design and execute performance and scalability testing activities where hands-on involvement is needed.
• Define realistic production-like workloads and test scenarios based on expected traffic, concurrency, throughput, and key business flows.
• Drive NFR alignment with engineering, Product, QA, DevOps/SRE, and Architecture teams, including performance expectations, acceptance criteria, and validation approach.
• Support definition and validation of SLAs/SLOs, performance baselines, and quality gates where needed.
• Establish and evolve a cross-company performance testing approach, including standards, practices, and frameworks that can be applied across multiple products.
• Identify bottlenecks across applications, APIs, databases, infrastructure, and integrations, and provide actionable optimization recommendations.
• Contribute to observability improvements, including dashboards, metrics, logs, reporting, and monitoring visibility.
• Work alongside performance testing engineers and other technical stakeholders, providing direction and architectural guidance while remaining hands-on where needed.
• Prepare clear reports on findings, risks, system limits, benchmark results, and recommended next steps to support production readiness and decision-making.
• Led resilience engineering initiatives by introducing chaos experiments in Kubernetes (OCI), validating system behavior under failure (latency injection, pod eviction, node outages), and integrating experiments into CI/CD pipelines to ensure reliability at scale.

Requirements

• Strong hands-on experience in performance testing / performance engineering / non-functional testing.
• Experience building, defining, or leading performance strategy for APIs, backend services, distributed systems, or high-load platforms.
• Strong experience with:
  • load and stress testing
  • bottleneck analysis
  • baseline validation
  • performance reporting
  • production-like test scenarios
• Good understanding of NFRs, including performance, scalability, reliability, and availability considerations.
• Experience with SLA/SLO-driven validation and performance quality gates.
• Experience integrating performance checks into CI/CD.
• Experience with quality gates in release processes.
• Experience working with observability and monitoring tools, dashboards, metrics, logs, and reporting, ideally in Kubernetes-based environments.
• Ability to operate as an architect-level hands-on specialist: shaping strategy, aligning teams, and contributing to implementation when needed.
• Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills, with ability to work effectively across Product, Architecture, DevOps/SRE, QA, and Engineering teams.
• Broad system-level perspective and ability to translate performance goals into practical execution plans.

Nice to Have

• Experience with APM tools and distributed tracing
• Experience with microservices, cloud environments, and Kubernetes at scale
• Experience defining or standardizing performance practices across multiple teams or products
• Familiarity with applying AI/ML techniques to areas such as anomaly detection, performance insights, or predictive scaling

We Offer

• Reveal great tech solutions: Join the team of experts who create custom, cutting-edge tech solutions for world-renowned businesses, fueling client growth. Unleash your potential, tackle new challenges, and be part of a team that values your skills and contributions. Focus on long-term impact and building tailored, long-lasting partnerships with our clients.
• Experience an agile and flexible working environment: Enjoy the freedom of fully remote work with a flexible working schedule. Empower yourself with a stable workload and a stable income, supported by provided laptops and licensed software. We focus on lasting cooperation and unite result-oriented individuals who stand on a high-performance approach to work.
• Embrace the opportunity for personal and professional growth: Benefit from performance and merit reviews, elevate your skills with personal development plans, and individual learning through the corporate library, public speaking support, and more.
• Be among like-minded people: Work with a team of one mind who cares about what they do and how they do. Collaborate with top-notch experts who are always ready to help and support you through any challenges. Join company-wide tech and cultural events, and contribute to meaningful CSR initiatives that resonate with your values. Feel supported by your HR, and take advantage of our referral bonus program.

Interview Steps

• Pre-Screening with the recruiter
• Technical interview (up to 90 min)
• Managerial Interview (30 min)
• Final interview with the client

About the Company

SPD Technology is a global software product development company that creates cutting-edge tech solutions that drive clients’ growth. We provide software engineering, product development, and IT consulting services to world-renowned companies, ranging from Fortune 500 firms to emerging startups across the globe. Founded in 2006, we’ve delivered over 460 custom projects for high-growth startups, SMBs, and enterprises, building strong partnerships with industry leaders such as PitchBook, Morningstar, Blackhawk Network, Poynt, Space Needle, and many more. Specialising in fintech and digital payment solutions, data engineering, AI/ML, and Cloud technologies, we build products ranging from MVPs to complex, enterprise-grade solutions. We are presented globally: we have 2 development centers in Europe, a representative office in Romania, the U.K., Cyprus, and remote teams, working worldwide from 32 countries around the globe.