Performance Center of Excellence Lead

Frontline Education; Wayne (PA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Frontline Education Group seeks a Performance Center of Excellence Lead to partner with Platform, SRE, and product engineering teams to raise performance and scalability for our K-12 education platforms. You will establish the standards, tooling, and testing methodology that drive reliable, real-world performance across the portfolio.

You will lead enablement, develop maturity models, and embed on high-priority initiatives while guiding a small QA practitioner to ensure performance work is

Qualifications

• Experience building and leading performance engineering programs.
• Ability to define standards, maturity models, and enablement frameworks.
• Experience selecting and standardizing performance tooling across engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the performance engineering charter, standards, and enablement framework.
• Conduct maturity assessments and establish a repeatable framework for evaluating performance risk.
• Embed with engineering teams on high-priority initiatives to provide hands-on performance testing leadership.

Skills

Performance engineering

Standards & governance

Tooling selection

Performance testing

Cross-functional leadership

Center of Excellence

Tools

Load testing tools

Observability tooling

Test automation

Job description

Description

Performance Center of Excellence Lead

Location: Remote or Hybrid to Wayne, PA

Frontline's Performance Center of Excellence Lead partners across Platform, SRE, and product engineering teams to raise the performance and scalability bar for the systems that power K-12 districts nationwide. In this role, you will build and lead Frontline Education's performance engineering practice — establishing the standards, tooling, and testing methodology that our engineering organization uses to validate that our products perform reliably under real-world load. This is a center-of-excellence model focused on organizational capability-building, not large-scale team management. You will operate as Frontline's performance engineering authority: leading enablement and education across teams, establishing standards and maturity practices, reporting on adoption progress, and embedding directly on high-priority initiatives where performance risk is highest. You will also manage an existing performance QA practitioner who will contribute to hands‑on performance testing and tooling work. Success depends on influence, technical credibility, and the ability to scale performance engineering practices across teams you don't directly manage. The Performance COE Lead will report to the VP of Platform and Architecture and will work in close partnership with SRE, Platform Engineering, and product engineering leaders to ensure performance is treated as a first‑class engineering discipline — not an afterthought validated late in the delivery cycle.

Key Responsibilities

Center of Excellence Leadership

• Define and own Frontline's performance engineering charter, standards, maturity model, and enablement framework across the product portfolio. This includes establishing self‑service playbooks, tooling guidance, and educational resources that allow teams to conduct performance engineering independently.
• Conduct performance maturity assessments of product and platform teams, identifying gaps in testing coverage, tooling, and readiness for scale. Establish a repeatable framework for evaluating performance risk ahead of major releases, customer onboarding events, and infrastructure changes. Build and maintain relationships with Platform, SRE, and product engineering leadership to ensure performance practices are adopted consistently, not just recommended.

Standards, Tooling & Methodology

• Select, standardize, and maintain the performance, load, and resilience testing toolchain used across engineering (e.g., load generation, observability, results analysis).
• Develop testing methodology that reflects real customer traffic patterns — including scenarios like concentrated egress from K-12 district networks — rather than idealized synthetic load.
• Define clear performance benchmarks, SLOs, and acceptance criteria that product teams can self‑serve against.
• Maintain a library of reusable test plans, scripts, and playbooks to reduce duplicated effort across teams.
• Author and maintain reusable agentic skills and agents that support automated test plan generation, smart load‑testing orchestration, and performance analysis—enabling teams to conduct performance engineering with AI assistance.

Embedded Engagement

• Embed directly with engineering teams on high-priority, high-risk initiatives — including new customer onboarding, major architectural changes, and known scaling pain points — to provide hands‑on performance testing leadership.
• Lead technical discovery with product and platform teams (and customers, where relevant) to uncover performance risks