Director of Performance & Reliability Engineering

Blue Shield of CA; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Stellarus Technology seeks a Director of Performance Engineering and Test Automation to define and implement automated performance and reliability validation systems. You will lead testing across distributed systems, API platforms, and cloud-native services, shaping standards, tooling, and AI-assisted approaches to improve quality and speed.

You will collaborate with engineering teams to embed performance practice into CI/CD, monitor production readiness, and guide release gates with robust

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant discipline and 4+ years of related experience if no degree.
• 10+ years in software engineering, quality engineering, performance engineering, platform engineering, SRE, or similar.
• 6+ years leading teams or programs focused on performance, test automation, reliability, or production readiness.
• Hands-on with automated test systems, load testing frameworks, performance pipelines, or reliability tooling.
• Experience testing distributed systems, microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native apps.
• Understanding latency, throughput, concurrency, queueing, backpressure, caches, DB performance, and failure modes in prod.
• Experience with testing/observability tools: k6, Gatling, JMeter, Locust, Playwright/Cypress/Jest, Grafana/Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic, Azure Monitor.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and making results actionable.
• Preference for experience applying AI-assisted testing tools for test generation, analysis, or productivity.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes, containers, cloud infra, API gateways, message queues, databases, and service observability.
• Ability to collaborate with engineers at code, architecture, infra, and ops levels.
• Experience defining benchmarks, synthetic workloads, test data strategies, and release readiness criteria.
• Clear communication of performance risk and actionable engineering guidance.
• Experience in healthcare, payer, SOC 2, HIPAA, or security-sensitive platforms is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own strategy and implementation for performance testing, load testing, scalability validation, resilience testing, synthetic monitoring, and release gates.
• Define standards, patterns, tooling, and expectations for performance across design, build, test, and operate stages.
• Lead the creation of automated performance validation systems and integrate AI-assisted tools where beneficial.
• Collaborate with developers to embed performance practices into CI/CD pipelines and dashboards.
• Drive observability and production-readiness through end-to-end test automation and release readiness criteria.

Skills

Test automation

Load testing

Performance engineering

Reliability

CI/CD

Kubernetes

APIs

Observability

AI-assisted testing

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Tools

k6

JMeter

Gatling

Locust

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Datadog

New Relic

Azure Monitor

Terraform

Docker

Job description

Stellarus Technology seeks a Director of Performance Engineering and Test Automation to define and implement automated performance and reliability validation systems. You will lead testing across distributed systems, API platforms, and cloud-native services, shaping standards, tooling, and AI-assisted approaches to improve quality and speed.

You will collaborate with engineering teams to embed performance practice into CI/CD, monitor production readiness, and guide release gates with robust