Performance Test Engineer Lead

The Performance Test Engineer Lead will drive the performance testing strategy and execution across enterprise applications leading a team of 3 5 performance engineers while maintaining hands-on technical involvement. This role combines deep technical expertise in performance engineering with team leadership client engagement and strategic planning. A critical aspect of this role is not just identifying performance issues but actively driving their resolution through deep technical troubleshooting cross-team collaboration and hands-on optimization work.

• Title: Performance Test Engineer Lead

• Location: San Ramon CA (100% Onsite)

• Design and implement comprehensive performance testing strategies for web applications APIs microservices and mobile platforms.

• Architect performance test frameworks and automation solutions using industry-standard tools (JMeter Gatling K6 LoadRunner BlazeMeter).

• Define performance benchmarks SLAs and KPIs in collaboration with architects and product teams.

• Conduct load stress spike endurance and scalability testing across diverse technology stacks.

• Establish APM (Application Performance Monitoring) practices using tools like New Relic Dynatrace or AppDynamics.

• Perform deep-dive root cause analysis on performance bottlenecks using profiling tools thread dumps heap dumps and APM traces.

• Collaborate directly with development teams to diagnose and resolve code-level performance issues (memory leaks inefficient algorithms poor concurrency handling).

• Analyze and optimize database queries indexes connection pooling and transaction management.

• Work with infrastructure teams to tune application servers web servers (Nginx Apache) JVM parameters and container resource allocations.

• Identify and resolve frontend performance issues (JavaScript execution render-blocking large payload sizes inefficient API calls).

• Recommend and validate caching strategies (Redis CDN configuration browser caching) and troubleshoot network-level bottlenecks (DNS SSL handshakes connection timeouts).

• Lead mentor and grow a team of 3 5 performance test engineers conducting code reviews for test scripts and frameworks.

• Serve as the primary performance testing SME for engagements presenting test results and findings to technical and business stakeholders.

• Lead war rooms and triage sessions during critical performance incidents and drive post-mortem analysis.

• Collaborate with DevOps teams to integrate performance testing into CI/CD pipelines (Shift-Left testing).

• Establish and maintain performance testing standards best practices playbooks and runbooks for issue resolution.

• Contribute to pre-sales activities including effort estimation and technical proposals.

• Experience: Proven track record as a Lead Performance Engineer with experience leading small teams (3 5 engineers).

• Tools: Expert knowledge of JMeter Gatling K6 or LoadRunner and APM tools (Dynatrace New Relic or AppDynamics).

• Core Strength: Heavy focus on optimization and troubleshooting (JVM tuning heap/thread dump analysis database tuning) rather than just running scripts and generating reports.