Sr. Software Performance Engineer

Company Description

Citizens is pleased to offer this opportunity in the Jacksonville, FL area. At Citizens, we’re building a workforce of top achievers committed to our company’s mission and vision. Our company values the knowledge that comes from experienced and dedicated individuals with a variety of backgrounds, in or out of insurance.
Citizens’ Mission is to provide property insurance protection in Florida to those who are, in good faith, unable to obtain coverage through the private market while also providing the utmost in customer service. Our Values are public service, integrity, respect, responsiveness and sound judgment. We strive to not only provide affordable insurance products and services but also to provide sound financial responsibility to the citizens of Florida.
At Citizens, we are a team of dedicated, service-minded professionals committed to our policyholders. Come achieve and maximize your potential with us!

Job Description

This position is responsible for developing, executing, debugging and maintaining performance test scripts in support of the business meeting performance SLAs.

Job Duties

• Models ethical behavior and executes job responsibilities in accordance with Citizens core values, ethics, and information protection policies.
• Lead and facilitate software performance requirements gathering meetings and estimate efforts based on empirical experience and proven methods. 
• Analyze architectural, navigational, and hardware design documents/diagrams for load/performance testing design execution. 
• Build complex simulators to simulate virtual users that match a real life scenario to identify and help tune the enterprise applications for better performance.  
• Gain complete understanding of both infrastructure and enterprise technical architecture of systems under test with the ability to identify typical performance issues and bottlenecks.
• Identify, communicate and track performance issues to closure working in close collaboration with cross-functional development team including analysts and developers.
• Write and review performance test reports covering the results of testing activities and communicate test results and metrics to other IT system groups, business units and management.
• Establish and champion Performance QA standards, procedures, and processes by staying abreast of the latest industry trends; develop road maps for Performance Testing Services.

Qualifications

• 6 or more years experience working in QA performance-based testing in an enterprise-level web based environment to include: 4 years multi-tiered web based application performance testing using HP Performance Center & LoadRunner or similar. 
• Experience with application & system monitoring solutions such as Wily Introscope, Windows PerfMon, SQL Server Profiler or similar tools; 3 years of experience with Java profilers and app. performance management toolset.
• Bachelor’s Degree OR 3 years relevant experience, OR a combination of college education and relevant experience equivalent to 3 years Computer Science/Information.

Required Knowledge, Skills and Abilities: 

• Proven interpersonal, verbal and written communication skills, including technical documentation skills. 
• Advanced knowledge of database concepts including advanced SQL programming skills. 
• Advanced knowledge of SDLC and varying software development methodologies. 
• Expert in profiling, identifying and resolving performance issues at application and DB level.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts and ideas in simple, understandable business language. 
• Ability to analyze complex statistics to generate system performance math models. 
• Ability to learn new tools and programming languages with little formal training. 
• Expert ability to use performance monitoring & analysis tools on client, middleware, and backend app component. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Knowledge of Property & Casualty insurance
• 6 or more years of experience in System design, Performance Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering including Availability, Latency, Performance, Efficiency, Change Management, Monitoring, Emergency response and Capacity Planning services.
• Expert in Performance Testing, Tuning and Scripting using Performance Center and JMeter with exposure to various protocols (Http/HTML/ Ajax, Tru client, Citrix, Java over Http, Truclient Mobile, RTE, WebServices, etc.)
• Experience in setting up monitoring tool such as Wily, Dynatrace, HTTP Watch, Fiddler, IE/Chrome developer tools, Diagnostics management and implementation of system upgrades, enhancements, and bug fixes.
• Strong understanding of the monitoring soluti