Director - Performance & Reliability

Test Director - Performance and Reliability

Position Overview

We seek a Head of Performance & Reliability Engineering to lead our performance testing, performance engineering, chaos testing, and system reliability practices for our flagship RUN Powered by ADP® product. This role will define the vision, strategy, and execution for building highly performant, resilient, scalable products. The successful candidate will work cross-functionally with product development, engineering, DevOps, and infrastructure teams to ensure our platforms meet demanding performance SLAs and can gracefully withstand failures.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership
∙ Define and execute the organization’s performance and reliability strategy across applications, platforms, and services.
∙ Establish and champion standards, frameworks, and best practices for performance engineering, load/soak/stress/spike testing, chaos testing, and observability.
∙ Partner with product development, architecture, and engineering leaders to embed performance and resilience objectives into the software development life cycle (SDLC).

Performance Engineering & Testing
∙ Lead the design, execution, and analysis of performance tests (load, stress, spike, soak).
∙ Drive adoption of performance engineering practices: code profiling, architectural reviews, capacity planning, and proactive bottleneck identification.
∙ Oversee tooling strategy (e.g., LoadRunner, NeoLoad, Locust, k6) and optimize test automation in CI/CD pipelines.

Chaos Engineering & Reliability
∙ Establish and scale a chaos testing program to validate resilience against system failures, network disruptions, and dependency outages.
∙ Partner with SREs and platform teams to define SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets that align with business outcomes.
∙ Drive continuous improvement in incident detection, MTTR, and root cause analysis.

Observability & APM
∙ Implement and evolve observability practices across metrics, logs, and distributed tracing.
∙ Drive adoption of APM tools (e.g., Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic) to enable actionable insights during performance and chaos tests.
∙ Ensure 95%+ of critical user journeys and tier-1 services are monitored end-to-end.

Team Leadership & Culture
∙ Build, mentor, and lead a team of performance engineers, testers, and reliability specialists.
∙ Foster a culture of proactive performance and resilience ownership across engineering teams.
∙ Advocate for performance and reliability in executive forums, influencing technology and product direction.

Qualifications

Required
∙ 10+ years of experience in performance engineering, performance testing, or site reliability engineering (SRE).
∙ 5+ years in leadership roles, proven to build and lead high-performing teams.
∙ Deep expertise with performance testing methodologies (load, stress, spike, soak).
∙ Hands-on knowledge of performance testing tools (e.g., LoadRunner, NeoLoad, Locust, k6, JMeter).
∙ Strong experience in chaos engineering practices and tools (e.g., Gremlin, Chaos Monkey, Litmus).
∙ Expertise in observability and APM platforms (Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, OpenTelemetry).
∙ Strong background in distributed systems, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), and microservices.
∙ Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence executives and engineers.

Preferred
∙ Experience with large-scale user load simulation (1M+ VUs).
∙ Familiarity with AI-driven testing approaches (e.g., NeoLoad MCP, Copilot-assisted scripting).
∙ Experience with DevOps/CI-CD performance integration.
∙ Proven track record of improving system scalability, resilience, and cost-efficiency.