Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-duty infrastructure and performance engineering contract meant for someone who knows how distributed systems break under load. You will be right in the middle of a massive platform consolidation effort for major dining and restaurant tech, meaning your work directly dictates whether systems stay up when traffic spikes. If you enjoy building out test beds from scratch rather than just clicking 'run' on an existing script, this one is worth your time.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Expect to spend a good chunk of your week spinning up and tearing down Google Cloud Platform and Kubernetes environments specifically tuned to replicate heavy production traffic. You won't just execute k6 or JMeter scripts; you'll be knee-deep in data seeding, orchestrating complex test scenarios, and figuring out why a specific microservice bottlenecks when concurrency ramps up. Half the battle here is environment parity and making sure your monitoring metrics in Datadog, Prometheus, or Grafana actually tell the truth when things go sideways.
The Core Tech Stack
You need to be completely fluent in Google Cloud Platform and Kubernetes orchestration—deploying and troubleshooting clusters is bread and butter here. Beyond that, the stack relies heavily on modern load testing tools like k6, Gatling, or JMeter, backed by solid observability platforms like Prometheus and Grafana. If you've also written Terraform for Infrastructure-as-Code or baked performance gates into CI/CD pipelines, you'll feel right at home.
Interview Expectations
Expect the hiring team to hand you a scenario where a high-throughput API endpoint starts throwing 504 Gateway Timeouts under a sudden load spike, and they'll want you to walk through your debugging methodology live across GCP, Kubernetes resource limits, and application logs. They are secretly testing whether you can think systematically across the entire stack—from pod autoscaling down to database connection pooling—rather than just guessing at configuration tweaks.
Application Advice
Your resume needs to heavily emphasize hard metrics—don't just say you 'ran load tests,' specify the scale of the user concurrency you handled, the size of the Kubernetes clusters you managed, and the exact throughput improvements you unlocked. Make sure keywords like Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Datadog, and k6 or JMeter are explicitly tied to your past achievements to easily clear the ATS filters.