Senior Software Development Engineer in Test
- Salary
- $5,000 - $6,000 per month
- Level
- Senior
- Work type
- Remote · Germany only
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 3 October 2026.
About the role
This position is open to candidates from anywhere in the world.
As a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET), you will design and build the performance testing systems, infrastructure, and engineering tools that enable a high-scale technology platform to validate application performance, reliability, and scalability under realistic production conditions.
This is primarily a performance engineering and infrastructure-focused role, not a traditional manual QA or functional UI automation position. The emphasis is on developing the systems needed to simulate real-world traffic, identify performance bottlenecks, and determine whether applications and infrastructure can handle significant workloads before deployment.
A key challenge will be building scalable testing capabilities that can reproduce production-like traffic patterns and infrastructure conditions that conventional staging environments cannot easily simulate.
You will combine hands-on performance engineering with software development, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps practices to create reliable, repeatable, and automated testing capabilities. This includes writing code, building testing frameworks and environments, integrating performance validation into CI/CD pipelines, and working closely with platform engineers to understand application behavior at scale.
This role is ideal for an engineer with a strong background in performance engineering, scalability, or platform infrastructure who enjoys building technical solutions from the ground up and taking ownership of complex performance and reliability challenges.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain scalable performance testing platforms, frameworks, and infrastructure capable of simulating real-world production workloads.
- Build and execute load, stress, scalability, endurance, and synthetic testing solutions to validate application performance and infrastructure reliability.
- Develop systems capable of generating realistic traffic patterns and workloads, including high-concurrency scenarios and distributed load testing.
- Analyze production traffic patterns, historical usage data, and infrastructure metrics to design representative performance testing scenarios.
- Write production-quality code using TypeScript, Python, or comparable programming languages to develop performance testing tools, frameworks, and supporting infrastructure.
- Build repeatable testing environments that closely replicate production architecture, resource constraints, and traffic behavior.
- Identify and investigate performance bottlenecks involving latency, throughput, bandwidth, application response times, CPU, memory, databases, and infrastructure capacity.
- Use monitoring, observability, and application performance data to analyze testing results, diagnose scalability issues, and recommend improvements.
- Integrate performance testing and automated validation into CI/CD pipelines to identify scalability risks before production deployments.
- Work with cloud infrastructure and distributed applications hosted on AWS, Google Cloud, Cloudflare, or comparable platforms.
- Use Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent technologies to provision and manage repeatable testing environments.
- Collaborate with platform engineers, software developers, and infrastructure teams to understand system architecture, investigate performance issues, and validate improvements.
- Establish performance benchmarks, testing standards, and scalable engineering processes that improve confidence in application and infrastructure changes.
- Independently design and implement performance testing capabilities as part of a new engineering-focused testing function.
Requirements
- Strong professional experience in performance engineering, scalability engineering, software engineering in test, or related infrastructure-focused engineering roles.
- Strong hands-on experience designing and implementing load, stress, performance, or scalability testing solutions for high-traffic applications.
- Experience building performance testing frameworks, testing infrastructure, or internal engineering tools rather than exclusively executing predefined test cases.
- Strong programming skills in TypeScript, Python, or comparable modern programming languages, with the ability to independently develop and maintain testing systems.
- Experience using performance testing tools or frameworks such as k6, Gatling, JMeter, Locust, or similar technologies.
- Experience testing or supporting large-scale applications serving millions of users or visitors.
- Strong understanding of workload modeling, concurrency, throughput, latency, bandwidth, infrastructure capacity, and application performance.
- Experience analyzing performance results and identifying bottlenecks across application, database, network, and infrastructure layers.
- Hands-on experience with cloud-hosted applications and infrastructure using AWS, Google Cloud, or comparable cloud platforms.
- Strong understanding of DevOps, platform engineering, distributed systems, and modern software deployment practices.
- Experience integrating automated performance testing or engineering validation into CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, Pulumi, or similar technologies.
- Ability to independently investigate complex performance and scalability problems and develop practical engineering solutions with limited oversight.
- Strong written and spoken English, with the ability to explain technical findings and collaborate effectively with distributed engineering teams.
Benefits
- Salary: $5,000 to $6,000 USD per month
- PTO: 15 days
- Holidays: Local or US holidays
What this role asks for
Standard for QA / testing roles
Python · Test Automation
Common in QA / testing postings at any company.
In most of Sur's ads
AWS
Named in most of its open postings, whatever the role.
Read against Sur's other open postings on this site.
Salary context
6 other open postings titled Senior Software Development Engineer in Test state a salary: median USD 120,000 to USD 160,000 a year.
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