Head of Performance & Reliability Engineering

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

Job summary

Stellarus Technology seeks a Director of Performance Engineering and Test Automation to design and operate automated performance validation across the platform. You will set standards for testing tooling, synthesize monitoring data, and partner with engineering teams to validate production readiness and release gates.

The role emphasizes AI-assisted testing, observability, and scalable practices across distributed systems and cloud-native architectures, reporting to the VP of Engineering.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Hands-on background building automated test systems, load testing frameworks, performance pipelines, or reliability tooling.
• Experience testing distributed systems, microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native apps.
• Strong understanding of latency, throughput, concurrency, queues, caching, DB performance, saturation, and failure modes.
• Experience with tooling such as 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 useful to engineering teams.
• Prefers applying AI-assisted engineering tools for test generation, analysis, automation or developer productivity.

Responsibilities

• Own strategy and implementation for performance, load, scalability, resilience testing and synthetic monitoring.
• Define standards, patterns, tooling, and expectations for design, build, test and operate services.
• Lead continuous improvements to deliver production-ready services with clear performance signals.
• Collaborate with engineers at code, architecture, and infrastructure levels to enable testing across layers.
• Evaluate AI-assisted tools for test generation, analysis, and workflow automation.

Skills

Leadership

Performance testing

Test automation

CI/CD pipelines

Observability

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

Distributed systems

API testing

AI-assisted testing

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

k6

Gatling

JMeter

Locust

Playwright

Cypress

Jest

Grafana

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Datadog

New Relic

Azure Monitor

Job description

Stellarus Technology seeks a Director of Performance Engineering and Test Automation to design and operate automated performance validation across the platform. You will set standards for testing tooling, synthesize monitoring data, and partner with engineering teams to validate production readiness and release gates.

The role emphasizes AI-assisted testing, observability, and scalable practices across distributed systems and cloud-native architectures, reporting to the VP of Engineering.