Job Summary

The QA Performance Team Lead is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role responsible for defining, scaling, and governing performance engineering capabilities across enterprise applications. This role owns the performance engineering vision, ensuring performance validation evolves from targeted testing into a scalable, insight-driven capability. The QA Performance Team Lead sets direction for workload modeling, performance testing practices, CI/CD performance validation, and team development, partnering closely with Engineering, Architecture, DevOps, and Product to ensure performance risks are clearly identified and managed as part of delivery readiness.

Responsibilities and Duties

Performance Strategy & Capability Growth
• Define and evolve the performance engineering strategy aligned with business and technical goals.
• Establish standards, best practices, and governance for performance testing and reporting.
• Drive the maturity of performance testing from targeted validations to repeatable, scalable practices.
• Define success metrics and KPIs for performance readiness.
• Define how AI-assisted analysis is incorporated into performance engineering practices to improve insight, scalability, and decision-making.

Tooling Evaluation and Enablement
• Evaluate, recommend, and enable performance testing tools based on system architecture, scale, and CI/CD maturity.
• Define criteria for tool selection, including scalability, maintainability, integrations, and reporting.
• Lead adoption, configuration, and ongoing optimization of selected tools.

Performance Test Design & Execution
• Define realistic workload models, usage patterns, and acceptance thresholds.
• Design and oversee performance, load, stress, endurance, and scalability tests.
• Ensure performance testing reflects real-world and peak usage scenarios.
• Review and validate test results and conclusions before stakeholder communication.

CI/CD Integration & Release Readiness
• Integrate performance testing into CI/CD pipelines in collaboration with DevOps.
• Define performance validation checkpoints to support release readiness and go/no-go decisions.
• Ensure performance findings are clearly communicated and tracked to resolution.

Analysis, Reporting & Engineering Partnership
• Lead analysis of performance results and correlation with application, database, and infrastructure metrics.
• Translate findings into clear risk statements and prioritized recommendations.
• Partner with Engineering and Architecture on performance improvements and root cause analysis.
• Ensure AI-assisted performance insights are translated into clear risk statements and actionable recommendations.

Team Leadership & Scaling
• Hire, onboard, and mentor Performance Engineers as the team grows throughout the year.
• Define role expectations, development plans, and technical standards for the team.
• Coordinate collaboration across US and Mexico resources, ensuring consistent practices and alignment.

Continuous Improvement & Innovation
• Evolve performance practices based on lessons learned, system changes, and scale.
• Improve repeatability, reliability, and efficiency of performance testing activities.
• Contribute to documentation, playbooks, and shared knowledge.

Education and Experience
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 7+ years of experience in performance testing or performance engineering.
• Proven experience leading or owning performance initiatives across complex systems.
• Hands-on experience with performance testing tools such as Azure Load Testing, JMeter, LoadRunner, k6, or similar tools.
• Strong experience designing workload models and executing load, stress, endurance, and scalability testing.
• Strong analytical skills for interpreting results and identifying root causes.
• Experience working in CI/CD environments and collaborating with DevOps teams.
• Familiarity with cloud-based and distributed systems.
• Experience mentoring or leading engineers in a technical capacity.
• Experience working with distributed or cross-location teams.

Qualifications and Skills
• Strong technical leadership with a hands-on mindset.
• Ability to build structure and clarity in growing or evolving environments.
• Clear, data-driven communication of risks and recommendations.
• High ownership and accountability for performance outcomes.
• Strong collaboration across QA, Engineering, Architecture, DevOps, and Product.
• Comfortable influencing release decisions with data and analysis.