Lead Performance Test Engineer IV

Lead Performance Test Engineer IV

Western National is seeking a Lead Performance Test Engineer IV to join our team! The individual in this role will act as the senior technical leader for performance testing, influencing strategy standards, and execution. This individual will define and evolve enterprise wide performance testing frameworks, methodologies, and best practices, ensuring consistency, scalability, and alignment with business SLAs. This role applies deep expertise in performance test design, automation, and results analysis to provide actionable insights, mentor practitioners, and enable reliable, high-performing systems across the organization.

Responsibilities and opportunities of this role include:

• Defines and evolves enterprise wide performance testing strategy, standards, frameworks, and best practices and ensures consistent adoption across teams and portfolios.
• Establishes and maintains standards for performance test design, execution, environment readiness, and results reporting.
• Partners with QA leadership to evolve performance testing practices and organizational maturity.
• Establishes organizational guidance for capturing, validating, and tracing nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) to performance test scenarios and SLA outcomes.
• Provides expert oversight of workload modeling and the design of load, stress, soak, endurance, and scalability testing approaches for complex systems.
• Enables and guides teams in the creation, maintenance, and optimization of performance test scripts, test data, and test environments.
• Mentors and coaches Performance Test Engineers I–III, strengthening test design rigor, analysis quality, and reporting consistency across the organization.
• Drives enterprise integration of performance testing within CI / CD pipelines to support continuous feedback and early risk identification.
• Defines performance reporting standards, including dashboards, SLA validation, trend analysis, and executive-level insights derived from performance test results.
• Leads cross-team root cause analysis using performance test data and evidence and partners with engineering, architecture, and vendors on remediation planning.
• Oversees performance test environment readiness, including coordination of deployments, data refreshes, monitoring instrumentation, and test stability.
• Evaluates and recommends performance testing tools, platforms, and reporting solutions to improve coverage, efficiency, and scalability.
• Provides technical leadership and guidance over performance testing tools, frameworks, methodologies, and reporting standards.
• Anticipates enterprise-level performance risks and ensures testing approaches address systemic bottlenecks.
• Leads complex performance investigations by guiding analysis and root cause efforts using structured test evidence.
• Translates performance test results into actionable, leadership-ready insights that inform risk and release decisions.
• Consistently acts according to our customer experience standards, including responding quickly, maintaining a positive attitude, building rapport, demonstrating empathy, managing the customer's expectations, using the proper communication channel for the situation, and taking ownership to ensure the customer's issue is resolved.
• Partners with engineering, product, architecture, and leadership stakeholders to ensure performance testing practices validate system reliability, responsiveness, scalability, and SLA adherence across the organization.
• Provides clear, trusted performance insights that enable informed decision making for releases, risk acceptance, and prioritization.
• Performs special projects and other duties as assigned.

Must-have qualifications for a candidate include:

• Ten-plus years of progressive experience in performance testing of enterprise and customer-facing applications, with demonstrated impact across multiple systems or portfolios.
• Advanced expertise in performance test design and workload modeling, including defining realistic user behavior, data patterns, and test scenarios aligned to business SLAs.
• Proven ability to lead complex, cross-team performance testing initiatives from strategy through execution, analysis, and stakeholder communication.
• Deep understanding of performance test automation, including script design, test data management, environment considerations, and integration within CI / CD pipelines.
• Strong analytical skills with the ability to interpret performance test metrics, validate SLA outcomes, identify risk trends, and translate findings into actionable insights.
• Demonstrated ability to operate independently with minimal oversight while influencing teams and decisions across the organization.
• Advanced communication skills, including the ability to present performance test results and risk and insights clearly to both technical and executive audiences.
• Enterprise-level strategic thinking, with the ability to define, scale, and mature performance testing practices across teams and portfolios.
• Strong prioritization and…