Performance Architect - INSIDE IR35 - Hybrid

Location: London, UK

Working: Hybrid - 3 days per week in the office
Contract: 12 months
Rate: £600 per day
Positions: 1

The Role

We are looking for an experienced Performance Architect to define and drive performance strategy across the full solution life cycle.

You will ensure applications and platforms are scalable, resilient and capable of meeting business and operational demands, working closely with architects, technology leaders and delivery teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and govern end-to-end performance strategies for applications and enterprise platforms.
• Establish and validate Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) covering scalability, availability, reliability and response times.
• Develop sizing models, capacity plans and workload forecasts.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across applications, databases, Middleware, infrastructure and cloud.
• Provide architecture recommendations to improve performance, scalability and resilience.
• Lead performance assessments across design, development, testing and production readiness.
• Establish performance engineering standards, frameworks and governance.
• Identify performance risks and develop appropriate mitigation strategies.
• Work closely with senior architects, technology leaders and programme teams.
• Mentor engineering teams on performance engineering best practices.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Strong experience in Performance Architecture and Performance Engineering.
• Solid understanding of enterprise architecture and distributed systems.
• Proven experience with NFRs, capacity planning, sizing and workload forecasting.
• Strong knowledge of application, database, Middleware, cloud and infrastructure performance.
• Experience conducting performance assessments and bottleneck analysis.
• Hands-on knowledge of performance testing and monitoring tools.
• Experience with cloud-native, microservices and large-scale distributed architectures.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities.

Desirable

• Experience with AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Knowledge of SRE and observability.
• Experience with DevOps, CI/CD and performance automation.
• Knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with tools such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, Grafana or Azure Monitor.
• Experience working across large-scale transformation programmes.
• Relevant architecture or performance engineering certifications.