Performance Engineering Lead

Performance Engineering Lead Contract Length: 12+ Month Contract (with potential extension)
Location: Dallas, TX (3-4 days onsite)
**The Consultant must be based in Dallas, TX and available for onsite work as well as in-person interviews.**
We are seeking a Performance Engineering Lead to drive enterprise-wide performance engineering strategy across platforms and application teams. This role goes beyond test execution and focuses on designing scalable performance frameworks, improving performance visibility, and enabling teams to deliver reliable, high-performing applications that can support both current demand and future growth. The ideal candidate will act as a trusted advisor to development, infrastructure, and testing teams while continuously advancing performance engineering maturity.
Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in performance engineering with deep knowledge of scalability and reliability principles
• Hands-on expertise with performance testing tools such as NeoLoad and JMeter
• Proven experience evaluating performance tool ecosystems and recommending improvements
• Strong understanding of application, API, database, and infrastructure performance analysis
• Experience with cloud-native performance and scalability testing
• Exposure to APM and monitoring tools such as Grafana and Dynatrace
• Experience working in Agile and Waterfall environments with CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI a plus)
• Ability to quickly understand complex application architectures and provide actionable feedback
• Comfortable working in a hybrid model and flexible to support critical testing activities when needed

Key Responsibilities

• Define and lead performance engineering strategy, standards, and governance across application teams
• Serve as a central point of contact for performance testing best practices within the Testing Enablement function
• Assess current performance capabilities and identify bottlenecks across applications, APIs, databases, and infrastructure
• Evaluate, pilot, and implement performance testing tools and frameworks to improve scalability and performance visibility
• Design, develop, and maintain reusable performance test scripts and frameworks
• Define SLAs, SLOs, and capacity benchmarks in collaboration with enterprise architecture teams
• Partner with project teams to translate business and technical requirements into effective performance test strategies
• Create and promote standardized intake processes for performance testing across new initiatives
• Design realistic load models aligned with production traffic and extreme demand scenarios (including storm-related events)
• Integrate performance testing into CI/CD pipelines and support continuous performance testing practices
• Collaborate closely with developers, product owners, and infrastructure teams to identify performance improvement opportunities
• Monitor performance test results and metrics to drive measurable improvements in system reliability and scalability
• Stay current with emerging performance testing technologies and recommend enhancements to testing leadership
• Support shift-left and test-driven development practices by enabling teams earlier in the delivery lifecycle

Genius Road, LLC is proud to be a Certified Women s Business Enterprise, an Equal Opportunity Employer and values diversity. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit and business need.