About the role:At 8am, quality is not a phase-it's a mindset woven into every conversation, decision, and line of code. We are looking for a Performance Quality Engineer to own performance observability, define meaningful metrics, and drive data-informed decisions about system behavior under load. You will work directly with Platform Engineering, development teams, and product leadership to surface performance risks before they become customer-facing problems.
You will report to the Senior Director of Quality Engineering and maintain a dotted-line relationship with the Sr. Director of Platform Engineering.
What you'll do:- Design and create performance test suites for multiple product teams against a microservices-based SaaS platform running on AWS.
- Operate and help maintain production-like environments for performance analysis, diagnosis, and regression testing.
- Analyze application and infrastructure logs to identify, isolate, and help root-cause performance degradations.
- Define, track, and report on performance KPIs (response times, throughput, error rates, resource utilization) and deliver trend analysis and projections to engineering leadership and product stakeholders.
- Use usage and trend data to identify capacity risks and provide recommendations before they impact customers.
- Collaborate with Platform Engineering, DevX, SDET, and Product teams to prioritize and validate performance improvements.
- Partner with Security QE on the overlap between performance and security risk. Load and stress tests reveal how systems degrade under pressure, which is exactly what attackers exploit via DoS and resource-exhaustion vectors. This role will collaborate with Security QE to integrate security-informed scenarios (authentication storms, TLS renegotiation abuse, API rate-limit validation) into performance test plans, and surface high-resource-cost endpoints to security for assessment.
- Identify and define nonfunctional performance tests for CI/CD pipeline gates (Integration, Regression, Post-Deployment). Work with DevX and Platform Engineering to establish pass/fail thresholds that catch regressions before production.
- Contribute to performance engineering standards, runbooks, and best practices within the QE organization.
About you:- 3+ years of hands-on performance testing and analysis on microservices-based, cloud-hosted (AWS) SaaS platforms.
- Strong analytical skills with a demonstrated ability to move from symptoms to root cause.
- Background in statistical analysis: trend modeling, interpolation, extrapolation, and capacity forecasting.
- Working knowledge of AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, ECS/EKS), Docker, and Kubernetes.
- Experience with performance testing tools (k6, Gatling, Locust, JMeter, or equivalent).
- Experience with observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog) and log aggregation (ELK Stack, CloudWatch).
- Scripting proficiency in Python or comparable language for test scenarios, data analysis, and light tooling. Coding experience is a plus, but this role prioritizes performance engineering skill over software development depth.
- Comfortable working asynchronously across multiple time zones in a remote-first team.
- Demonstrated experience leveraging AI tools and technologies to improve workflows, enhance decision-making, or drive innovation.
Additional InformationThe annual salary range for this position is $120,000 to $165,000. The salary range for performing this role outside of the US / Austin / California may differ. 8am is committed to offering competitive, fair and commensurate compensation and has provided an estimated pay range for this role. Actual compensation may vary based on job-related knowledge, skills, experience and education.
