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).
• Experience with DevOps/CI-CD performance integration.
• Proven track record of improving system scalability, resilience, and cost-efficiency.