Performance Tester / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) are a bridge between development and operations, applying a software engineering mindset to infrastructure services. This position will focus on the overall reliability and availability of the University of Minnesota's enterprise applications and infrastructure services, with an emphasis on performance testing, engineering, and monitoring.
This position is an exciting opportunity to help define and operationalize Site Reliability Engineering within the Office of Information Technology and beyond. Ideal candidates will have an insatiable desire to automate, excellent interpersonal skills, and a strong commitment to fostering an inclusive, diverse, and equitable environment built on trust, collaboration, and mission-focused work.

Candidates must:

• Understand complex enterprise networks and their dependencies
• Design, build, socialize, and monitor service-level metrics
• Identify and reduce toil
• Apply industry performance testing concepts to the University environment

We Offer:

• University paid contribution (10% of your salary) to your retirement account - vested immediately.
• 22 paid vacation days per year, in addition to sick leave and 11 paid holidays.
• Reduced tuition opportunities covering 75% - 100% of eligible tuition.
• Excellent and affordable health care benefits.
• Wellness program with opportunity to earn lower health care rates.
• Free disability insurance.
• Annual merit increase program.

Job Responsibilities

• Execute benchmark, load, stress, endurance, capacity, break, and other non-functional tests.
• Collaborate with IT professionals across the OIT to implement performance testing across the entire technology stack including front-end, back-end, database, and network technologies.
• Communicate complex technical concepts, problems, and solutions to technical and non-technical audiences including Service Owners, managers, and Sr. Directors across OIT.
• Design and executing performance tests and defining synthetic transactions.
• Recommend performance tuning approaches, execute solutions, and work collaboratively with other IT teams such as DBAs, System Admins, and Developers to resolve performance issues.
• Design, plan, build and implement monitoring tools that promote visibility, transparency, and early detection in a complex technical environment.
• Collaborate with business customers to gather requirements and help identify test cases to satisfy the customer's performance testing goals.
• Identify manual or repetitive tasks, document them, and automate them.
• Partner with team to define, monitor, and alert on appropriate service level metrics.

Required Qualifications
*Please document on resume.

• Bachelor's degree and four years of relevant experience or a comparable combination of education, training, and experience.
• Experience in test planning, test estimation, test strategy, workload design, test case design, test environment setup, test data setup, defect management, and configuration management.
• SAFe, Lean, or Agile experience.
• Experience with LoadRunner or JMeter
• Must be able to work in a collaborative cross-functional team environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB) Certification.
• Experience with Python, Splunk, and Grafana.
• Testing experience in on-prem, cloud-agnostic, and hybrid environments.
• Experience planning, designing, and building tests as they relate to continuous improvement/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.