Senior Performance Engineer

CloudBees; Denver (CO); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Health insurance

401(k) match

Headspace access

Home office stipend

Hybrid work in Denver

Job summary

CloudBees is seeking a Senior Performance Engineer to help design and implement performance testing as code, establishing measurable baselines and quality gates. You will partner with engineering teams to identify bottlenecks and ensure resilience, latency, and throughput targets are met across distributed services.

You will combine software engineering, systems thinking, and production telemetry to enable faster shipping with trust and reliability, in a hybrid environment with Denver, CO-based

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering, performance engineering, SRE, or related field with hands-on performance testing experience.
• Strong development skills in at least one language (Java, Go, Python, or JavaScript/TypeScript).
• Experience with performance/load-testing tools (k6, Gatling, JMeter, Locust or equivalent).
• Experience automating tests and quality gates in modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Knowledge of distributed systems, APIs, microservices, containers, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure.
• Ability to translate critical user journeys into workloads, thresholds, and actionable recommendations.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills to influence technical decisions.

Responsibilities

• Design and own performance engineering strategy for products and services in your domain.
• Build and maintain automated load, stress, spike, soak, scalability, and resilience tests as code.
• Integrate performance tests and thresholds into CI/CD workflows.
• Define performance baselines, SLIs/SLOs, and release criteria with stakeholders.
• Diagnose bottlenecks using observability data, profiling, and logs.
• Collaborate with engineers, SRE, and product teams to design for performance early.
• Create realistic test environments, workloads, and capacity models for cloud-native systems.
• Develop dashboards and automated reports for performance trends and risks.
• Improve performance practices, tooling, and documentation across teams.
• Coach engineers on performance testing and root-cause analysis.
• Leverage AI coding agents to build/test workloads and analyze results.

Skills

Java

Go

Python

JavaScript/TypeScript

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

k6

Gatling

JMeter

Locust

Job description

Description

Job Title: Senior Performance Engineer

Job Type: Full-time

Location: Hybrid - Denver, CO (3 days on-site per week)

About CloudBees

CloudBees helps organizations build, run, and govern software factories, giving enterprises the confidence to ship software better, faster, and safer.

Writing code is no longer the bottleneck. Governing what reaches production and validating its impact is. As enterprises adopt agentic coding, software is created faster than most teams can review, secure, and validate. Without consistent governance, organizations risk shipping code they cannot explain, audit, or trust.

CloudBees addresses this challenge without asking teams to replace the tools they already use. Across every toolchain a customer runs, CloudBees makes each change, human or AI, visible, auditable, and accountable before it reaches production. CloudBees Unify is the product behind this: a governance layer, with context and control-plane capabilities, that enforces consistent policy and evidence across every tool, team, and workflow.

Founded in 2010, CloudBees is backed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bridgepoint Capital, HSBC, Golub Capital, Delta‑v Capital, Matrix Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Visit us at www.cloudbees.com.

About The Role

CloudBees is evolving its quality engineering model around automated testing, and this role will help define how performance, scalability, and reliability are engineered into our products from the start. As a Senior Performance Engineer, you will build performance testing as code, establish measurable baselines and quality gates, and partner with engineering teams to identify and resolve bottlenecks before they reach customers. You will combine hands‑on software engineering, systems thinking, and production telemetry to help CloudBees ship software faster without compromising trust, resilience, or customer experience.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities

• Design and own the performance engineering strategy for the products and distributed services in your domain.
• Build and maintain automated load, stress, spike, soak, scalability, and resilience tests as version‑controlled code.
• Integrate performance tests, thresholds, and regression detection into CI/CD workflows at the appropriate stage of the delivery process.
• Partner with service owners and SRE to define meaningful performance baselines, service‑level objectives, and release criteria across latency, throughput, error rates, resource use, and scalability.
• Diagnose performance bottlenecks using observability data, profiling, tracing, logs, metrics, and disciplined experimentation.
• Partner with software engineers, architects, SRE, product, and platform teams to design for performance early in the development lifecycle.
• Create realistic, repeatable test environments, workloads, data sets, and capacity models for cloud‑native systems.
• Develop dashboards and automated reporting that make performance trends, regressions, and risks visible to engineering leaders.
• Improve performance engineering practices, tooling, documentation, and technical standards across teams.
• Coach engineers on performance testing, measurement, root‑cause analysis, and automated quality practices.
• Use AI coding agent (Claude code or similar) to build and maintain test suites, generate workloads, and analyze results and apply judgement to what they produce.

Qualifications

Required

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, performance engineering, site reliability engineering, or a closely related discipline, including substantial hands‑on performance testing experience
• Strong software development skills in at least one language such as Java, Go, Python, or JavaScript/TypeScript
• Hands‑on experience with performance and load‑testing tools such as k6, Gatling, JMeter, Locust, or equivalent
• Experience automating tests and quality gates in modern CI/CD pipelines
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, APIs, microservices, containers, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure
• Experience analyzing latency, throughput, concurrency, error rates, resource saturation, and capacity limits
• Experience using observability and profiling tools to isolate bottlenecks across application, database, network, and infrastructure layers
• Ability to translate business‑critical user journeys and reliability expectations into realistic workloads, measurable thresholds, and actionable engineering recommendations
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence technical decisions across teams

What We Value

• Customer Obsessed — You treat customer problems as your own and build relationships with the people behind the logo, not just the account. You can point to decisions you changed because of what a customer told you.
• High Agency — You own problems beyond your job description and move without waiting to be asked. When the path isn't defined, you make the call and bring people with you rather than working around them.
• Truth Seeking — You hold a strong point of view and update it when the data says otherwise. You argue for the best answer regardless of who's in the room, and once a decision is made, you commit to it fully.
• Hard Work — You own the end result, not just your slice of it, and you go beyond what's expected to get there. You work smart as well as hard, and you find real reward in building something demanding alongside people who do the same.
• Ship Excellence — You hold a painfully high quality bar and keep raising it, while shipping with urgency instead of waiting for perfect. Every iteration is something you learn from.
• Direct Feedback — You give honest, constructive feedback regardless of seniority or tenure, and you actively ask for it in return. You deliver it with enough care that people want to hear it from you.

Preferred (Not Required)

• Experience with enterprise DevOps, software delivery, developer platforms, or governance products
• Experience testing large-scale Kubernetes or multi‑tenant SaaS environments
• Experience with OpenTelemetry and observability platforms such as Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, or New Relic
• Experience with chaos engineering, resilience testing, capacity planning, or cost‑performance optimization

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Pay Range: $130,000 - $160,000 annually In accordance with applicable law, this represents a reasonable estimated compensation range for this role. Actual compensation will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location and may be more or less than the amount shown above. Outside of base compensation, CloudBees also offers stock options and variable bonuses.

What CloudBees Offers

• Time that's actually yours. Our BEE‑Flexible PTO policy folds vacation, sick time, and personal days into one unlimited plan. Plus paid U.S. holidays and 2 dedicated Bee‑Giving Days to volunteer for a cause you care about.
• Health coverage from day one. You're eligible on your start date, not 90 days in. Choose from medical, dental and vision options designed to support your healthcare needs. Choose an HDHP plan and we will contribute to your HSA on top of your own pre‑tax contributions.
• Real money toward your future. Invest in your future with a competitive 401(k) company match, offering both pre‑tax and Roth options to help you reach your financial goals.
• Protection we pay for entirely. We fully fund your Life and AD&D, Short Term Disability and Long Term Disability protection. Plus our Employee Assistance Program is fully covered too.
• Support for your headspace - literally. All Bees have access to a company‑sponsored Headspace account. Plus, a dedicated Care Concierge service in the U.S. so you never have to decode a benefits question alone.
• A home office that works. A stipend every month toward your work‑from‑home setup in addition to the opportunity to work (hybrid for Denver, CO employees) in an office with your peers.
• Upside when we win. Base salary is the floor. Our bonus plan rewards for the goals you deliver and the growth we drive together.
• People who sweat the craft. A team that takes its work seriously and invests in each other's growth.
• A global, collaborative team that lives by our values: Customer Obsessed, High Agency, Truth Seeking, Hard Work, Ship Excellence, Direct Feedback.

EEO Statement

CloudBees is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All employment decisions are made based on qualifications, merit, and business need, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

Disclaimer

This job description is intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed. It is not an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications required of employees assigned to this position. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.