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.

• Define and own Frontline's performance engineering charter, standards, maturity model, and enablement framework across the product portfolio. This includes establishing self-serviceable 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.

• 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

• 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 before they surface in production.
• Act as a technical partner during incident retrospectives where performance or scale was a contributing factor, translating findings into standard updates.