About the Team

Running a small team of dedicated engineers, you will ensure the baseline performance of the suite of eCommerce applications is kept competitive. Performance is key to any ecommerce site and Next is one the biggest online retailers in the UK. Your team helps keep it that way.

About the Role

- In this role, you’ll be controlling the workload of the performance team and providing coaching and guidance to help them succeed.

- You will meet with the business at all levels to understand their testing requirements and guide them through the performance testing process. You will be acting as a quality gatekeeper and must be comfortable with holding your position when required.

- You will contribute to, and enforce best practices to ensure performance is recognised and respected as a key component on the path to live.

- Alongside your team management responsibilities this is still a hands on role. You’ll identify risks and create appropriate load test coverage to validate new features as well as the load regression, developing load test plans, models, scripts and scenarios with their monitored KPIs as required.

- Due to the nature of this role, overnight working will be required to execute large scale performance tests of the production platform.

There are flexible working options available with this role, including home working

Criteria Essential

- Previous experience of successful Team management
- Significant experience of performance testing

- Knowledge and experience of NeoLoad, LoadRunner, Gatling, JMeter or similar load testing tools

- Experience of Microservice architectures and API load testing

- Experience with Dynatrace (or other app monitoring tools) and Kibana/Grafana (or other Data Analysis and Visualisation tools)

- Experience in analysis of performance test results and the ability to present concise and accurate information to Senior Management

- Extensive knowledge of Performance testing methodologies, tools & scripting

- The ability to work in a dynamic environment where priorities change frequently

- Knowledge of programming in Microsoft technologies (.Net/CORE, Web API, SQL server, WCF, etc)

- Strong written and verbal communication skills

Desirable

- Strong background in a software quality assurance role

- Ecommerce Experience

- Knowledge of Javascript programming

- Relevant academic degree or equivalent related qualification

- Dev Ops and Automation Experience

- Azure Portal

- Azure DevOps

- Page speed testing and optimisation experience, i.e. use of Lighthouse, WebPageTest or similar

- Integrating load and page speed tests into CI/CD pipelines

- Synthetic and RUM tools: mPulse, Blue Triangle, Rigor or similar

- Experience of performance testing Docker and Kubernetes

Benefits

• Bonus Scheme
• Pension Scheme
• ShareSave Scheme
• Life Assurance
• Staff Discount
• On-site Nursery

About Next

You know Next, but did you know we’re a FTSE-100 retail company employing over 43,000 people across the UK and Ireland. We’re the UK’s 2nd largest fashion retailer and for Kidswear we’re the market leader. At the last count we have over 540 stores, plus the Next Online and it’s now possible to buy on-line from over 70 countries around the world! So we’ve gone global!