Director, Performance Engineering and Test Automation

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

Job summary

Stellarus Technology seeks a Director of Performance Engineering and Test Automation to define the practice, build tooling, and partner with engineering teams to ensure performance and reliability before production.

You will own strategy for performance testing, synthetic monitoring, and release gates while guiding AI-assisted testing and observability across distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-native apps.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent with 4 years of additional relevant experience.
• 10 years of software/quality/performance engineering or related experience.
• 6 years leading teams or programs focused on performance, test automation, reliability, or production readiness.
• Hands-on experience building automated test systems, load testing frameworks, and performance pipelines.
• Experience testing distributed systems, microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native apps.
• Understanding of latency, throughput, concurrency, backpressure, caching, DB performance, and failure modes in production.
• Experience with tools like k6, Gatling, JMeter, Locust, Playwright, Cypress, Jest, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic, Azure Monitor.
• CI/CD integration for automated tests; AI-assisted tooling is a plus.
• Strong Kubernetes, containers, cloud infra, API gateways, queues, DBs, and observability knowledge.
• Ability to communicate risk and translate findings into engineering action.
• Preference for healthcare/payor/security-sensitive platform experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the strategy and implementation for performance testing, load testing, scalability validation, resilience testing, and synthetic monitoring.
• Define standards, patterns, tooling, and expectations for design, build, test, and operate services; explore AI-assisted tooling.
• Build and lead automated performance testing capabilities and release gates across Stellarus platform.
• Collaborate with engineers to integrate tests into CI/CD and improve signal from test results.
• Drive observability improvements and production readiness across distributed workloads.
• Establish performance benchmarks, synthetic workloads, and data strategies for reliable production environments.

Skills

Performance engineering

Test automation

CI/CD integration

Kubernetes

Observability

AI-assisted testing

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms

Release gates

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

k6

Gatling

JMeter

Locust

Playwright

Cypress

Jest

Grafana

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Datadog

New Relic

Azure Monitor

Terraform

ArgoCD

GitHub Actions

Docker

Kubernetes

API Management

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.