Head of Performance Engineering & Test Automation

Blue Shield of CA; Oakland (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Stellarus Technology is seeking a Director of Performance Engineering and Test Automation to define and implement automated performance validation systems across distributed services. You will architect performance testing strategies, build tooling, and partner with engineering to ensure production readiness.

This leadership role emphasizes reliability, observability, and AI-assisted tooling to improve quality and speed.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent with 4 years of relevant experience.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Define 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.
• Collaborate with developers to define standards, patterns, tooling, and expectations for design, build, test, and operate services, including AI-assisted tools.
• Own the practice by building tooling and setting up production-readiness criteria and release gates.
• Partner with engineering teams to create a culture where performance and reliability are validated continuously.

Education

Bachelor's degree

High School Diploma/GED with 4 years of relevant experience in lieu of degree

Tools

k6

Gatling

JMeter

Locust

Playwright

Cypress

Jest

Grafana

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Datadog

New Relic

Azure Monitor

Terraform

ArgoCD

GitHub Actions

Docker

Job description

Stellarus Technology is seeking a Director of Performance Engineering and Test Automation to define and implement automated performance validation systems across distributed services. You will architect performance testing strategies, build tooling, and partner with engineering to ensure production readiness.

This leadership role emphasizes reliability, observability, and AI-assisted tooling to improve quality and speed.