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. 

AI at BambooHR
At BambooHR, we’re all about setting people free to do great work, and we believe AI is a powerful partner in that mission. We’re leaning into intelligent tools to streamline our workflows, giving us more time for high-impact innovation. We look for curious, forward-thinking people who are ready to explore how AI can elevate their work and help us reimagine the future of HR.

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.

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