Non-Functional Testing Lead

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Job Overview

Team Context:

The Prime Services horizontal team is a critical component of our engineering organization, focusing on delivering robust and high-performance solutions tailored to the unique demands of Prime Services applications. Within this structure, the Non-functional team acts as a horizontal gating function, ensuring the scalability, robustness, and overall resilience of our applications through rigorous and effective testing methodologies. We are committed to upholding the highest standards of application quality, performance, and stability.

Your Role as Lead:

As a Lead in the Non-functional team, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the Non-functional quality for Prime-specific applications. Your primary focus will be on leading and executing non-functional testing strategies to ensure our applications meet stringent performance, scalability, reliability, and security requirements. You will be responsible for:

• Strategy & Execution: Defining and implementing comprehensive non-functional testing strategies for Prime Services applications, including performance, load, stress, scalability, and resilience testing.
• Leadership & Mentorship: Guiding and mentoring a team of engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, continuous improvement, and innovation in testing practices.
• Technical Expertise: Applying deep technical knowledge to design, develop, and maintain advanced testing frameworks, tools, and simulations that mimic real-world Prime Services operational scenarios.
• Collaboration: Working closely with development, product, and operations teams to embed non-functional requirements early in the development lifecycle and to provide timely, actionable insights into application behavior under various conditions.
• Risk Mitigation: Identifying potential bottlenecks, failure points, and performance degradation risks within the application architecture and proposing effective mitigation strategies.

Where You Fit In:

You will be at the intersection of engineering excellence and critical business operations. Your work will directly impact the reliability and performance of our Prime Services applications, which are fundamental to our clients' success and our market position. You will be instrumental in ensuring that our technology not only functions but excels under pressure, providing a stable and scalable platform for complex financial operations. This role offers the opportunity to lead significant initiatives, drive technical innovation, and make a tangible impact on high-visibility projects within a dynamic and intellectually stimulating environment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Strategic Non-Functional Testing (NFT) Leadership: Lead the definition, development, and implementation of comprehensive NFT strategies and approaches across Prime Services applications. This encompasses designing test objectives, scope, success criteria, and ensuring effective rollout of NFT processes from early development phases through to production.
• Advanced Performance Engineering & Analysis: Drive deep application profiling, core performance engineering, and tuning activities. Expertly utilize tools and methodologies for analyzing heap and thread dumps, performing Splunk and other log profiling, conducting SQL Profiling, and AWR analysis to precisely identify and resolve performance bottlenecks at the code, configuration, and architectural layers.
• Test Environment, Tooling & Execution Oversight: Manage the setup, configuration, and meticulous maintenance of dedicated non-functional test environments that accurately replicate production conditions. This includes evaluating, selecting, and integrating cutting-edge non-functional testing tools such as LoadRunner, JMeter, and developing custom scripting for test execution, alongside building custom test harnesses and automation scripts.
• Process Governance & Continuous Improvement: Establish, design, and enforce robust standards and procedures for all NFT activities throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Continuously analyze organizational trends and external industry best practices to foster continuous improvement, streamline processes, and ensure consistency and high quality across the organization.
• Integration of Observability & Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): Champion the integration of non-functional testing with advanced observability and monitoring capabilities to support robust Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. Collaborate closely with technology and production support teams to build comprehensive monitoring solutions utilizing platforms like Grafana for both pre- and post-production performance validation.
• Chaos Engineering & Resilience Testing: Design and implement chaos engineering experiments to proactively identify vulnerabilities and failure modes in Prime Services applications and infrastructure. Employ methodologies to simulate real-world disruptions (e.g., latency injection, service outages, resource exhaustion) to validate system resilience, fault tolerance, and automated recovery mechanisms.
• Team and Project Leadership: Lead and mentor a global team of high-profile performance engineers, managing resource allocation, project estimates, and task prioritization across multiple streams. Drive talent development, conduct performance evaluations, and foster technical excellence and growth within the team.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration & Delivery Excellence: Foster effective collaboration with diverse stakeholders including technology teams, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) professionals, and business users from critical departments like Equities Prime and Futures Clearing. Deliver complex performance and non-functional engineering assignments for high-impact banking products.
• Capacity Management & Risk Mitigation: Proactively identify and assess infrastructure capacity headroom for franchise-critical applications in both production and performance environments. Implement strategies to mitigate performance and stability risks, ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements, internal Citi policies, and sound ethical judgment in all technical decisions.

Experience:

• 7-10+ years of extensive experience in Performance Testing and Performance Engineering, with a proven track record in optimizing complex financial applications.
• 2-3 years of hands-on experience specifically in Chaos Engineering, designing and executing experiments to validate system resilience and fault tolerance.
• Demonstrated excellence in applying performance engineering principles, observability techniques (including tools like Splunk, Grafana), resiliency patterns, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices.
• Highly proficient in utilizing a wide array of performance testing tools (e.g., LoadRunner, JMeter, custom scripting) and advanced analytics to identify performance bottlenecks and deliver actionable recommendations for significant improvements in application throughput and capacity.

Technical Skills:

• Software Development Lifecycle & Methodologies: In-depth knowledge of software development and testing lifecycle methodologies, with extensive experience in Agile practices, project management, and issue tracking using Jira.
• Performance Engineering Tools: Proficient with leading performance testing tools including LoadRunner, LoadRunner Enterprise, and JMeter, along with custom scripting for test automation.
• Observability & Monitoring Platforms: Well-versed in observability and monitoring solutions such as AppDynamics, Splunk, Grafana, and the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack.
• Cloud Native & Distributed Technologies: Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies like OpenShift and Kubernetes, and distributed messaging systems like Kafka.
• Programming & Database Expertise: Hands-on experience with programming languages (e.g., Python, Java) and database technologies (e.g., Oracle DB, PostgreSQL, SQL).
• Documentation & Collaboration: Working knowledge of Confluence for comprehensive documentation and knowledge management.

Communication & Leadership Skills:

• Influential Communication: Exceptional communication and diplomacy skills, with a proven ability to persuade, influence, and articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Team Leadership & Mentorship: Demonstrated capability to assume leadership roles, effectively guiding and mentoring junior team members to foster professional growth and technical excellence.
• Interpersonal & Collaboration: Strong interpersonal, verbal, and written communication skills, essential for effective collaboration with cross-functional teams and stakeholders.

Education Qualification:

• Bachelor's/University degree, or equivalent practical experience, preferably in Computer Science or Information Systems.

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Job Family Group:

Technology

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Job Family:

Applications Development

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Time Type:

Full time

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Primary Location Full Time Salary Range:

$120,800.00 - $170,800.00

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Most Relevant Skills

Please see the requirements listed above.

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Other Relevant Skills

For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.

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Automated Processing and AI

We use automated processing, including artificial intelligence, for our legitimate business interests (or our reasonable and appropriate business purposes) to identify and align the candidate's skills and abilities with a specific job opening. Additionally, if you so choose, or consent, we can match your skills and abilities to other suitable roles at Citi.

Importantly, all our hiring processes and decisions, including determining your suitability for a role, are conducted, checked, and decided by individuals. Our automated processing and AI do not involve relying on automatic or autonomous decision-making. Please refer to any Jurisdictional Considerations, with specific provisions for your country (where relevant) for further details.

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This job opening is for an existing job vacancy.

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