Performance Engineering Manager

Ford Credit is seeking a Performance Engineering Manager to lead the performance engineering practice within the Test Center of Excellence (TCoE). This leadership role combines deep technical expertise in performance testing and engineering with the ability to manage a team, drive strategy, and deliver results across Ford Credit's entire application portfolio: the Industrial Bank, Platform Modernization (Alfa Systems), Ford Bill, and future initiatives.

You will own the performance testing strategy, the team that executes it, and the engineering practices that make performance continuous, automated, and observable. Your work directly protects Ford Credit from production performance incidents, SLA violations, capacity planning failures, and degraded customer experiences.

• Own and evolve the Ford Credit Performance Testing Strategy, including the annual roadmap and multi-year vision (Foundation, Optimization, Maturity phases)
• Build, manage, and mentor a team of performance engineers; conduct hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, and career development planning
• Lead the gathering of Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) with product, architecture, and engineering teams, including workload models, SLAs, and test scenarios
• Direct the execution of all performance test types: load, stress, endurance, spike, volume, scalability, component, integration, regression, and browser performance testing
• Establish and enforce performance quality gates within CI/CD pipelines, preventing deployments when SLAs are not met
• Build and maintain continuous performance testing pipelines and Grafana/PowerBI dashboards for trend monitoring and executive reporting
• Own performance testing environment readiness, coordinating with FCSRE and infrastructure teams on provisioning, sizing, and capacity planning
• Deliver performance risk assessments, capacity planning recommendations, and production readiness evaluations to LL6+ leadership
• Foster AI-first engineering practices within the team for script generation, anomaly detection, and workflow automation
• Coordinate with FCSRE, Development, Product, Business, and third-party vendors on performance requirements and production readiness

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• 8+ years of hands-on performance testing and engineering experience, preferably in financial services or complex enterprise platforms
• 3+ years managing a performance engineering or test engineering team
• Expert-level proficiency with JMeter and/or Load Runner; experience with distributed load generation
• Strong proficiency in scripting languages (Java, Python, JavaScript/Type Script)
• Hands-on experience with GCP, observability tools (Grafana, Dynatrace, InfluxDB), and CI/CD integration (Cloud Build, Git Hub Actions)
• Deep understanding of distributed system architectures: microservices, API gateways, GraphQL orchestration, database performance (PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2)
• Demonstrated experience authoring and delivering a performance testing strategy with measurable outcomes
• Active use of AI tools for performance engineering efficiency (scenario generation, anomaly detection, capacity planning, report automation)
• Understanding of lending/financial data domains: loan lifecycle, payment processing, availability SLAs, disaster recovery RPO/RTO
• Familiarity with NFRs beyond performance: reliability, availability, scalability, chaos engineering, and distributed tracing
• Excellent communication skills; ability to translate complex performance data into business-impact narratives for non-technical stakeholders

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• Experience in the automotive, banking, or lending/fintech industry
• Kubernetes/container orchestration experience (GKE) and cloud-native performance tuning
• Familiarity with chaos engineering tools (Gremlin, Chaos Monkey) and resilience testing practices
• Exposure to shift-left performance testing and performance-as-code practices
• Experience with synthetic monitoring and…