About LearnVest

LearnVest is redefining the American approach to personal finance. Our planners leverage financial technology to create simple, affordable, realistic plans for anyone who wants to feel confident about their money and optimistic about the future. 

Since launching in 2010, LearnVest has been one of the premier financial technology companies in the country, helping thousands of people make progress on their financial goals. LearnVest was acquired by Northwestern Mutual in 2015 and is now scaling its technology and personal finance approach to help millions of people across both the LearnVest and Northwestern Mutual brands. 

Description:

As a technical, hands-on Senior Performance Engineer your job involves measuring, analyzing and determining how the performance, reliability and scalability of our applications can be optimized and continuously evaluated. You are responsible for working with application engineering, as well as test engineering teams and project stakeholders, to ensure that the software and system solutions are scalable, dependable and performant. You will be a driving force in leading the efforts to identify and remediate issues.

Testing terminology like stress, load, scalability, spike, endurance and volume should get you jazzed as should writing solid, reusable code and embracing solid CI/CD practices. This role offers leadership and mentorship opportunities that require a comprehensive understanding of application design, infrastructure and development/operations practices resulting from our continued evolution of the Performance Testing discipline across our organization. As part of our team, you will define, develop, execute and variety of performance tests and integrate them with continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines.

Your general milestones for the first year are the following:

• Within the first two weeks, be able to jump head-first into an ongoing project and ask the appropriate questions, do the appropriate research to effectively construct test cases, and begin to understand all needs to be done in terms of testing and supporting the team's eventual deployment of new features and functionality.
• Within one month, be able to write basic performance tests using our in-house framework that leverages Gatling.
• Within two months, be able to discuss the high-level functionality and infrastructure of the entire project. You will be developing domain expertise and you should understand all of the basic user flows and how the technology within the application works. You will be asked where performance improvements are needed as well as where the application is performant.
• Within three months, with little guidance, be able to write advanced performance tests in order to test entire features. You should have established your identity as the de facto leader and owner of the project's performance testing efforts.

Competencies

• Know your stuff. We don’t have a minimum number of years experience required, but be expected to perform at an extremely advanced level. If you can 100% say you are at the top of your field, then you are the right fit.
• A demonstrable ability to analyze performance problems in complex systems and a proven track record for being able to develop remediation strategies.
• A solid understanding of microservices, micro-applications, REST/SOAP data transmission, web applications and web browser concepts such as HTTP, connections, cookies, caching, streaming, etc.
• Experience working with data sets using common standards like JSON, XML, CSV, etc as well as general understanding of data storage, encoding, encryption, data transformation, and related concepts.
• Experience with application monitoring tools as well as server monitoring tools.
• Expertise in the critical analysis of performance test result and the identification of bottlenecks within systems and applications.
• Experience using Gatling, Jmeter and/or Kamon would be a tremendous plus.

Benefits

• Fully stocked snacks, beer fridge, cold brew kegs, frequent catered lunches, company dodgeball team, and whiskey hours
• Tuition reimbursement, commuter plans, and paid time off
• Highly competitive compensation that includes base salary plus bonus
• Medical/Dental/Vision plans, Matching 401(k), pension prog