AI Performance Engineering

David Campbell is one of the most experienced performance testing practitioners in the United Kingdom, with over 25 years of hands-on delivery across some of the country's most critical systems. What makes his profile unusual is its lineage. David began his career managing consultants from Mercury Interactive — the company that created LoadRunner, the tool that defined performance testing for two decades — and working alongside principal consultants from Starbase, the UK's leading specialist LoadRunner consultancy, who maintained the closest working relationship with Mercury of any firm in the country. He was trained and certified by Starbase, and later worked directly for Hewlett Packard during the period when HP owned LoadRunner. In an industry built on this tool, David learned his craft from the people who built it.

His path into performance testing was a deliberate choice. After graduating with a B.Sc. in Business Management from King's College London, David entered the industry as a certified Business Systems Analyst — a grounding in the link between technology and business that would shape his entire approach. He was being groomed for project management, and had the credentials for it. But when the opportunity arose to move into performance testing full time, he took it without hesitation. The tools were where his passion lay. He wanted to be inside the work — hand-crafting LoadRunner TCP/IP Winsock scripts, building client and server test harnesses from scratch — not managing it from a distance. He sharpened that craft through specialist consultancies including Mission Assurance and Testing and SQS, the largest specialist QA consultancy in Europe, whose rigorous methodology would inform everything he did thereafter.

Stand back and look at the client portfolio that followed. David founded and led the performance testing division at the Metropolitan Police Service for nearly seven years, delivering system improvements exceeding 200% and preventing multiple potential catastrophic service failures. He served as Head of Non-Functional Testing at HM Passport Office, leading a 16-person team through more than 50 engagements and establishing an NFT Centre of Excellence. He delivered as IBM's lead technical testing engineer at the DVLA, as Hewlett Packard's associate lead on the Ministry of Justice's UK Prison System, and as technical assurance lead on the FiReControl programme — the initiative to centralise and modernise England's entire fire rescue mobilisation capability. In the private sector, he tested Nationwide Building Society's Faster Payments platform, leading European merchant banks and insurers, Specsavers, and major retailers — in one case preventing hundreds of thousands of Euros in potential lost revenue by catching critical bottlenecks before peak trading. These are systems where failure makes the news.

Throughout this career, David built a reputation for taking on what others avoid — the “hot potato” roles, the complex challenges that nobody could fix, the failing programmes that needed rescuing. At Unisys, he resolved critical issues so quickly the client retained him for additional work. At Specsavers, he rescued a failing programme, with his SQS manager describing his offshore team leadership as “a lesson in how it should be done.” At FiReControl, the key supplier brought him back after his initial government engagement. His sixteen LinkedIn recommendations paint a consistent picture: technically exceptional, but with an unusual ability to communicate complexity clearly — someone with “the unique ability to think strategically balanced with the attention to detail to execute effectively.”

But David was never just a practitioner who used tools. He was always a builder who happened to work in testing. Even in his earliest roles, he was hand-crafting harnesses and custom scripts. At HMPO, that instinct became transformative: he designed a containerised testing framework that saved £100,000 per year and halved test preparation time, built an AI-driven ETL tool using NLP that automated weeks of manual work, and reduced AWS cloud resource usage by 90%. These were production-grade tools built under government security constraints, solving real problems for a live national service. That engineering capability, applied to 25 years of practitioner frustration, is what became LoadMagic. David is half French and bilingual in English and French.