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
