{"id":2597403,"url":"https://alion.io/job/photon-qa-engineer-performance-dallas-tx","title":"QA Engineer (Performance)- Dallas, TX","company":{"id":3186451,"name":"Photon","domain":"photon.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/photon-com","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Oracle","truth_index":{"grade":"D","score":44,"open_postings":455,"ghost_share":0.941,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-15T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"QA","role_family":"QA","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Dallas, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":38000,"max":null,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":38000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Bottleneck","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"JMeter","optional":false},{"name":"k6","optional":false},{"name":"LangSmith","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Locust","optional":false},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Quantization","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Weights & Biases","optional":false},{"name":"Cython","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-01-09T02:30:11Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-01-09","last_verified_at":"2026-10-15T15:08:05Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":279,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":279},"description":"We are looking for a Performance QA Engineer to specialize in benchmarking and optimizing our Agentic AI platform. You will be the gatekeeper of the \"User Experience of Thought,\" ensuring that as our AI agents plan, reason, and execute tasks, they do so within acceptable timeframes and cost-efficiency boundaries.\nYour mission is to stress-test the entire AI pipeline-from the initial prompt to the final autonomous action-identifying bottlenecks in LLM response times, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) retrieval speeds, and third-party API orchestration.\nKey Responsibilities\nLatency Benchmarking: Measure and optimize TTFT (Time to First Token) and Total Request Latency for complex agentic workflows that involve multiple reasoning steps.\nAgentic Loop Stress Testing: Simulate high-concurrency environments to see how the system handles hundreds of autonomous agents running simultaneously, particularly focusing on API rate limits and GPU/compute bottlenecks.\nRAG Performance Analysis: Test the speed and efficiency of the vector database retrieval process. Identify how increasing the \"context window\" size impacts overall system performance.\n Token Throughput Monitoring: Analyze the \"tokens per second\" (TPS) metrics and identify when model-switching (e.g., from a large model to a smaller one) is necessary to maintain performance.\nCost vs. Performance Optimization: Create reports that balance performance gains against token costs, helping the team find the \"sweet spot\" for production-grade agents.\n Orchestration Bottleneck Identification: Use profiling tools to find delays in the \"hand-off\" between different agents or between the agent and external tools (APIs, databases).\nAutomated Performance Regressions: Integrate performance testing into the CI/CD pipeline to ensure that new prompt versions or architectural changes don't degrade the agent's speed.\nRequired Skills & Qualifications\nExperience: 8+ years in Performance Engineering, with a specific focus on AI/ML applications or high-concurrency distributed systems.\nTooling Proficiency: Expert-level experience with performance testing tools like Locust, JMeter, or k6, specifically customized for Python-based AI backends.\nPython Mastery: Strong ability to write custom scripts to simulate complex, multi-step user/agent interactions.\nAI Infrastructure Knowledge: Understanding of LLM-specific performance factors, such as quantization, KV caching, and the impact of different model architectures on latency.\nObservability Expertise: Experience with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, LangSmith, or Weights & Biases to monitor system health and AI-specific metrics.\nDatabase Performance: Experience testing the query latency of Vector Databases under heavy load.\nCompensation, Benefits and Duration\nMinimum Compensation: USD 38,000\nMaximum Compensation: USD 133,000\nCompensation is based on actual experience and qualifications of the candidate. The above is a reasonable and a good faith estimate for the role.\nMedical, vision, and dental benefits, 401k retirement plan, variable pay/incentives, paid time off, and paid holidays are available for full time employees.\nThis position is not available for independent contractors\nNo applications will be considered if received more than 120 days after the date of this post","description_format":"text","description_chars":3296,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Retirement plans"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["IT Consulting & Digital Transformation"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-15T07:30:57Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":6,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.208,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":279,"expected_fill_days":22,"reasons":["conf:2","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-15T17:09:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":38000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/photon-qa-engineer-performance-dallas-tx","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/photon-qa-engineer-performance-dallas-tx.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-15T17:09:15Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":25963,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-16T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":3186451},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3186451"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fphoton-qa-engineer-performance-dallas-tx"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fphoton-qa-engineer-performance-dallas-tx"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fphoton-qa-engineer-performance-dallas-tx"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/photon-qa-engineer-performance-dallas-tx\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fphoton-qa-engineer-performance-dallas-tx"}]}