Lead SDET - Performance Testing

About HighLevel: HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system that gives agencies, entrepreneurs and SMBs the infrastructure to build, automate and scale. Today, HighLevel supports SMBs across 150+ countries, fueling community-driven growth rooted in real customer outcomes. To date, businesses operating on HighLevel have generated over $7 billion in ecosystem value, demonstrating the impact of shared infrastructure at scale. By centralizing conversations, automation and intelligence into one system, we help businesses move faster, reduce complexity and execute efficiently. Behind the platform, HighLevel powers more than 4 billion API hits and 2.5 billion message events daily. With 250 terabytes of distributed data, 250+ microservices and over 1 million domain names supported, our architecture is built for performance, resilience and long-term scalability.

Our People With over 2,000 team members across 10+ countries, HighLevel operates as a global, remote-first organization built for speed and ownership. We value initiative, clarity and execution, creating space for ambitious people to build systems that support millions of businesses worldwide. Here, innovation thrives, ideas are celebrated and people come first, no matter where they call home.

Our Impact Every month, HighLevel enables more than 1.5 billion messages, 200 million leads and 20 million conversations for the more than 1 million businesses we support. Behind those numbers are real people building independence, expanding opportunity and creating measurable impact. We’re proud to be a part of that. Learn more about us on our YouTube Channel or Blog Posts.

About the Role:

HighLevel is hiring a Lead SDET with 8+ years of experience to own the performance, scalability and reliability of our products. This is a technical lead role on the SDET platform team: an individual contributor with no direct reports, working with product-team SDETs, developers, DevOps and infrastructure teams across every product team. You will set the performance direction, build the shared tooling other SDETs adopt, and use performance data to influence architecture and release decisions. We want someone who enjoys ownership, works well in a fast-moving environment, and stays current with new tools, including AI-assisted approaches.

Responsibilities:

Build and evolve a shared performance testing framework and production-like environments (Kubernetes, cloud, test data) that product-team SDETs adopt

Integrate performance checks into CI/CD with agreed thresholds, and publish trend reports that engineering leaders use for release decisions

Define the performance strategy and roadmap, including SLIs, SLOs and baselines for critical services, prioritized by customer impact and risk

Model workloads from production traffic and customer behavior, run load, stress, soak and spike tests across backend and frontend, and lead capacity planning ahead of peak events

Lead root cause analysis of complex bottlenecks across frontend, API, database and queue layers, using runtime profiling and observability data, and work with development, DevOps and infrastructure teams to fix them

Evaluate new tools and approaches through PoCs and decide what we adopt

Mentor SDETs and developers on performance-aware design and testing, and use performance data to influence architecture decisions

Requirements:

8+ years in performance, scalability or reliability engineering or testing, with examples of measurable impact on production-scale distributed systems

Deep hands-on experience with k6, Gatling or Locust, including realistic workload modeling and distributed load generation, and strong programming skills in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript or Java

Experience using observability tooling (for example New Relic, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry) to isolate root cause across API, database and queue layers, with a solid grasp of REST service performance, concurrency and caching

Hands-on runtime profiling and thread or heap analysis on the JVM or Node.js (GC behavior, event-loop lag)

Hands-on frontend performance experience: Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse and real user monitoring

Experience designing performance gates in CI/CD that teams trust: stable baselines, controlled noise and clear pass/fail thresholds

Working knowledge of Kubernetes and at least one major cloud (GCP, AWS or Azure) to deploy and debug test environments

Experience leading performance work across multiple teams: setting direction, mentoring engineers and influencing without direct authority

Nice to Have:

Experience applying AI-assisted tooling to test design or result analysis

Experience with NoSQL or search datastores and message brokers at scale

Chaos or resilience testing, and safe testing in production (canaries, shadow traffic

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