Manager, Performance and Test Engineering

Please Note: This is a remote position available in the state listed on this job. Additionally, employment with BambooHR is contingent on passing both a background and credit check. 

Essential Job Duties

The Manager, Performance & Test Engineering will lead BambooHR’s Performance Test Engineering, Load & Stress Testing, and Test Automation (SDET) functions. This leader will develop and execute a long-term strategy for performance validation, observability-driven testing, automation frameworks, and scalable quality engineering practices.

This role partners closely with Engineering, Architecture, Product, and Platform Engineering to ensure our platform is reliable, performant, observable, and backed by robust automated quality signals.

You will:

Leadership & Strategy

• Build and lead a high-performing team of Performance Engineers and SDETs.
• Define the vision and roadmap for performance engineering, load testing, and automated testing across BambooHR’s product ecosystem.
• Drive a unified quality engineering strategy that blends performance, reliability, observability, and automation.
• Mentor and develop engineers, creating growth paths and fostering a culture of accountability, innovation, and craftsmanship.

Performance Engineering & Observability

• Own the performance engineering discipline, including system-level performance, scalability, latency, and capacity modeling.
• Oversee load, stress, and chaos/performance experiments aligned to product SLAs and SLOs.
• Partner with Platform and DevEx Engineering to strengthen observability tooling, metrics, and dashboards.
• Build frameworks and processes to proactively detect performance issues before they reach production.

Test Automation & Quality Frameworks

• Lead development of scalable, maintainable test automation frameworks for UI, API, and integration testing.
• Evolve testing practices to shift-left quality signals into CI/CD pipelines.
• Establish standards for test coverage, automation ROI, and quality metrics.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to embed automated quality practices into daily workflows.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Engineering to ensure performance and automation platforms integrate seamlessly into development ecosystems.
• Work with Product Management to define performance requirements, benchmarks, and quality gates.
• Coordinate with SRE/Platform teams to align on capacity planning, infrastructure improvements, and production insights.

What You Need to Get the Job Done

• 7+ years in Quality Engineering, Performance Engineering, SDET leadership, or related fields.
• 3+ years leading or managing high-performing engineering teams (SDET or performance-focused).
• Strong hands-on understanding of performance engineering: profiling, benchmarking, systems analysis, test design, and result interpretation.
• Deep experience with modern test automation frameworks (e.g., Playwright, Selenium, API automation).
• Solid understanding of observability practices (metrics, logs, traces) and tools (e.g., Datadog, Rollbar, Grafana, etc…).
• Experience building automated quality signals into CI/CD pipelines.
• AI at BambooHR: At BambooHR, we believe in leveraging cutting-edge technology to empower people and transform HR. We're actively integrating AI into our solutions and workflows to enhance efficiency and drive innovation. To that end, we're looking to our existing team members and future hires to share this forward-thinking mindset: individuals who are curious about AI's potential, eager to learn and adapt, and ready to explore how intelligent tools can elevate their work along with BambooHR's impact on setting people free to do great work. Join us in reimagining the future of HR! 

What Will Make Us REALLY Love You 

• Experience with distributed systems and cloud-native architectures (AWS preferred).
• Experience driving culture change toward “shift-left” quality engineering.
• Exposure to reliability practices (SLOs, error budgets, resilience testing).
• Strong communication and leadership skills with the ability to influence across teams.

What You'll Love About Us

• A Great Company Culture that has been recognized by multiple organizations like Inc, and Salt Lake Tribune
• Comprehensive health, life, and disability