Director, Performance Engineering and Test Automation

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

Your Role

The Stellarus Technology team builds and operates the platform, services, and products that support payer operations, member experiences, customer integrations, and internal product delivery. The Director, Performance Engineering and Test Automation will report to the VP, Engineering. In this role, you will create the automated performance and reliability validation systems that give engineering teams clear evidence before services reach production.

You will own the strategy and implementation for performance testing, load testing, scalability validation, resilience testing, synthetic monitoring, test data automation, and release gates across the Stellarus platform. You will work directly with developers to define the standards, patterns, tooling, and expectations teams use when they design, build, test, and operate services, including where AI and AI-assisted engineering tools can improve quality, speed, and signal.

This is a new role for a builder who can define the practice, implement the tooling, partner with engineering teams, and create a culture where performance and reliability are validated continuously. The role combines performance engineering, platform quality, automation, observability, and production readiness.

Our leadership model is about developing great leaders at all levels and creating opportunities for our people to grow personally, professionally, and financially. We are looking for leaders energized by creative and critical thinking, building and sustaining high-performing teams, getting results the right way, and fostering continuous learning.

Your Knowledge and Experience

• Bachelor's degree or High School Diploma/GED and 4 years of additional relevant experience in lieu of a degree.
• 10 years of software engineering, quality engineering, performance engineering, platform engineering, SRE, or related technical experience.
• 6 years leading teams or technical programs focused on performance, test automation, reliability, platform quality, or production readiness.
• Strong hands-on background building automated test systems, load testing frameworks, performance pipelines, or reliability validation tooling.
• Experience testing distributed systems, microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native applications.
• Practical understanding of latency, throughput, concurrency, queueing, backpressure, retries, caching, database performance, resource saturation, and failure modes in production systems.
• Experience with tools such as k6, Gatling, JMeter, Locust, Playwright, Cypress, Jest, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic, Azure Monitor, or similar platforms.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and making test results useful to engineering teams.
• Experience evaluating or applying AI-assisted engineering tools for test generation, analysis, automation, or developer productivity is preferred.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes, containers, cloud infrastructure, API gateways, message queues, relational databases, and service observability.
• Ability to work with engineers at code, architecture, infrastructure, and operational levels.
• Experience defining performance benchmarks, synthetic workloads, test data strategies, production-like environments, and release readiness criteria.
• Strong communication skills. You can explain performance risk clearly and turn findings into practical engineering action.
• Healthcare, payer, regulated-industry, SOC 2, HIPAA, or security-sensitive platform experience is preferred.

Technology Context

Stellarus is building primarily with:

• TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, React, Next.js
• PostgreSQL, Azure Blob Storage, Snowflake
• Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure API Management, Azure Service Bus
• Dapr for service invocation and pub/sub
• Terraform, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, Docker
• Auth0, OAuth2, OpenID Connect, API key support for integrations
• Nx monorepo, API contract-first development, automated testing

For this role, we especially value experience with:

• Automated performance and load testing for APIs and distributed workflows
• Synthetic monitoring and production-like traffic modeling
• Observability-driven debugging and regression detection
• AI-assisted test generation, failure analysis, and engineering workflow automation
• CI/CD quality gates and release readiness automation
• Database and message-queue performance analysis
• Kubernetes workload tuning and capacity planning
• End-to-end test automation for user-facing and service-level workflows

We value strong engineering judgment, a bias toward automation, and the ability to build systems that help product teams move faster with clear performance and reliability signals.

Hybrid

This role requires employees to be in-office based on our hybrid workplace model, balancing purposeful in-person collaboration with flexibility. For most teams, this means coming into the office two days each week.

Employees living more than 50 miles from an office location will work with their manager to determine in-office time based on business need.