Associate Director Engineering - Enterprise Performance Engineering

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for an Associate Director Engineering - Enterprise Performance Engineering based in the United States. This is a senior technology leadership role responsible for advancing enterprise-wide performance engineering capabilities across complex business and technology environments. You will lead a centralized team focused on performance testing, workload modeling, capacity planning, resilience, observability, and performance consulting. The role has broad influence across Engineering, Architecture, Infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, Quality Engineering, Data, AI, and Product teams. You will help shift the organization from traditional performance testing toward a modern, proactive performance engineering model embedded throughout the software lifecycle. You will also shape performance strategies for cloud-native platforms, distributed architectures, AI applications, and intelligent agents. The position combines people leadership, enterprise strategy, technical depth, and hands-on problem solving to improve scalability, reliability, and customer experience. It offers an opportunity to establish standards and capabilities that directly influence the performance and resilience of mission-critical technology platforms.

Lead the enterprise performance engineering strategy, roadmap, operating model, governance, standards, and methodologies. Manage and develop a centralized team of performance engineers, architects, and technical specialists, establishing priorities and fostering technical excellence. Provide enterprise performance engineering services across customer-facing, internal, cloud-native, AI-enabled, and mission-critical applications. Define and oversee performance strategies covering load, stress, volume, spike, endurance, scalability, capacity, reliability, and disaster recovery testing. Embed performance validation into Agile, DevOps, CI/CD, development, deployment, and production-readiness processes through repeatable and increasingly automated practices. Partner with Architecture and Engineering teams to incorporate performance, scalability, resilience, and reliability considerations into application and platform design. Lead performance analysis, tuning, and root-cause investigations across applications, APIs, databases, infrastructure, distributed systems, and cloud services. Establish performance engineering practices for Generative AI applications, LLM solutions, intelligent agents, and multi-agent workflows, including latency, throughput, resource utilization, and cost-performance validation. Drive the adoption of performance testing tools, automation frameworks, reusable accelerators, analytics, and AI-assisted testing capabilities. Lead cloud performance engineering across AWS and Azure environments, including microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, and containerized platforms. Collaborate with infrastructure, platform, SRE, security, quality, product, and technology enablement teams to optimize performance and cloud resource utilization. Serve as a trusted technical advisor, proactively identifying scalability risks and guiding teams toward resilient, high-performing solutions. Support workforce planning, succession planning, mentoring, and career development while promoting collaboration and continuous learning. Requirements Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field; equivalent relevant expertise may be considered. 10+ years of experience in software engineering, performance engineering, quality engineering, or a related technical discipline. At least 3 years of leadership experience managing engineering or performance engineering teams. Demonstrated experience leading performance testing and engineering initiatives for large-scale enterprise applications. Hands-on expertise with enterprise performance testing tools such as LoadRunner Enterprise, BlazeMeter, Apache JMeter, or Performance Center. Strong knowledge of performance analysis, capacity planning, workload modeling, application tuning, and enterprise performance optimization. Experience optimizing web applications, REST APIs, microservices, distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, and databases. Strong understanding of Java, REST APIs, cloud-native architectures, and enterprise architecture patterns. Experience with observability and performance monitoring platforms such as Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace, or New Relic. Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, communicate with senior technical stakeholders, collaborate across organizational boundaries, and remain hands-on when solving complex technical problems. Preferred experience in healthcare, insurance, financial services, or other highly regulated environments. Experience with Generative AI applications, LLM-based solutions, AI platforms, or intelligent agents is a strong advantage. Experience with AWS and Azure, as well as Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker, Terraform, SRE, chaos engineering, resilience testing, or fault-injection techniques, is preferred. Experience establishing enterprise-wide performance engineering practices, centers of excellence, digital transformation programs, or cloud modernization initiatives is advantageous. Relevant certifications in cloud technologies, performance engineering, DevOps, or SRE are a plus. Ability to work effectively from a dedicated home-office environment with reliable internet connectivity; occasional travel for meetings or training may be required. Benefits Annual base salary of $142,300–$195,700 , depending on location, qualifications, experience, education, certifications, and other job-related factors. Eligibility for a performance-based bonus incentive plan. Remote and work-from-home opportunities, with occasional travel for training or meetings. Medical, dental, and vision coverage. 401(k) retirement savings plan. Paid time off, company and personal holidays. Paid parental and caregiver leave. Short-term and long-term disability coverage. Life insurance and additional well-being programs. Programs designed to support personal wellness, healthcare decision-making, financial well-being, and career development. Equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation commitments for qualified applicants and employees.