Associate Director Engineering - Enterprise Performance Engineering

Humana • Remote US, MA

2d • $142,300 - $195,700 • Remote

About The Position

Humana is committed to helping people achieve their best health by delivering innovative technology solutions that power exceptional member and provider experiences.
The Associate Director, Software Engineering (Enterprise Performance Engineering) is a senior technology leader responsible for advancing Humana's enterprise performance engineering capabilities. This role leads a centralized team of performance engineers that provides performance testing, analysis, workload modeling, capacity planning, resilience testing, and performance consulting services across a broad portfolio of business and technology solutions.
This leader will help establish performance engineering as a strategic capability that enables application teams to deliver scalable, resilient, highly available, and high-performing solutions that meet business and customer expectations. The Associate Director combines strong people leadership with deep technical expertise and serves as a key leader in shaping performance engineering standards, tools, methodologies, and best practices.
The position requires significant experience in enterprise application performance testing, cloud performance engineering, observability platforms, AI application performance validation, and modern distributed architectures.
This role partners closely with Engineering, Architecture, Infrastructure, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Quality Engineering, Data Engineering, AI Engineering, and Product teams to ensure systems are designed, tested, monitored, and optimized for performance at scale.
The successful candidate will help drive the evolution from traditional performance testing to a modern performance engineering operating model that embeds scalability, resiliency, observability, and performance excellence throughout the software development lifecycle.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, performance engineering, quality engineering, or related disciplines.
• 3+ years of leadership experience managing engineering or performance engineering teams.
• Proven experience leading performance testing engagements for large-scale enterprise applications.
• Hands-on experience with enterprise performance testing tools such as: LoadRunner Enterprise, BlazeMeter, Apache JMeter, Performance Center.
• Strong expertise in performance analysis, capacity planning, workload modeling, and application tuning.
• Experience optimizing performance across: web applications, APIs, microservices, distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, databases.
• Strong understanding of Java, REST APIs, cloud-native applications, and enterprise architecture patterns.
• Hands-on experience with performance monitoring and observability platforms such as: Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace, New Relic.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, partner across organizations, and remain hands-on in technical problem solving.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in healthcare, insurance, financial services, or other highly regulated industries.
• Experience testing Generative AI applications, AI platforms, intelligent agents, and LLM-based solutions.
• Experience with AWS and Azure cloud architectures.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker, Terraform, and Site Reliability Engineering practices.
• Familiarity with chaos engineering, resilience testing, and fault injection techniques.
• Experience helping establish or mature enterprise-wide performance engineering practices or centers of excellence.
• Experience supporting digital transformation and cloud modernization initiatives.
• Relevant certifications in cloud, performance engineering, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering.

Responsibilities

• Lead execution of Humana's enterprise performance engineering strategy, roadmap, and operating model in alignment with broader engineering objectives.
• Establish and mature performance engineering standards, methodologies, frameworks, and governance practices.
• Lead a centralized performance engineering team supporting multiple business segments and technology portfolios.
• Drive adoption of performance engineering best practices throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Serve as a trusted advisor for application scalability, reliability, and system performance.
• Establish standards for load testing, stress testing, endurance testing, capacity planning, failover validation, and resilience engineering.
• Partner with technology leaders to proactively identify and address performance risks and scalability challenges.
• Lead performance engineering services supporting customer-facing, internal, digital, cloud-native, AI-enabled, and mission-critical applications.
• Establish service offerings that support application teams across design, development, testing, deployment, and production readiness.
• Define performance test strategies, workload models, and testing approaches for enterprise-scale applications.
• Oversee the planning and execution of performance validation activities, including: performance testing, load testing, stress testing, volume testing, spike testing, endurance testing, scalability testing, capacity testing, reliability testing, disaster recovery performance validation.
• Ensure performance testing is integrated into Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD delivery pipelines.
• Establish repeatable, measurable, and increasingly automated performance validation practices.
• Partner with Architecture and Engineering teams to embed performance considerations into application and platform design.
• Lead performance analysis and tuning efforts across complex enterprise applications and platforms.
• Conduct root cause analysis of performance issues involving applications, databases, infrastructure, APIs, and cloud services.
• Provide recommendations to optimize: application architecture, database performance, API response times, cloud resource utilization, distributed systems performance, caching strategies, messaging systems, network performance.
• Guide teams in designing scalable, resilient, and performance-optimized solutions.
• Establish performance engineering reviews and architecture assessments for critical initiatives.
• Partner with Engineering, Architecture, Product, Quality Engineering, SRE, Infrastructure, and Security teams to embed performance engineering into delivery processes.
• Establish performance engineering practices for AI-powered applications, Generative AI platforms, and autonomous agents.
• Define performance testing methodologies for Large Language Model (LLM) applications and AI workflows.
• Lead validation of: AI model response times, agent execution performance, prompt processing latency, throughput scalability, multi-agent orchestration performance, resource utilization, cost-performance optimization.
• Develop performance testing frameworks, benchmarks, and validation approaches for AI-enabled solutions.
• Lead strategy and adoption for performance testing tools, frameworks, and automation capabilities.
• Drive automation of performance testing and performance validation within CI/CD pipelines.
• Establish reusable performance testing frameworks, scripts, templates, and accelerators.
• Improve testing efficiency through automation, analytics, AI-assisted performance engineering, and continuous performance testing.
• Partner with enterprise engineering enablement teams to align performance practices with the broader software delivery toolchain.
• Lead performance engineering efforts across AWS and Azure cloud environments.
• Establish cloud performance testing models supporting microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, and containerized platforms.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure Engineering, Platform Engineering, and SRE teams to optimize cloud resource utilization and application performance.
• Support performance validation for enterprise cloud modernization initiatives.
• Ensure systems meet enterprise expectations for scalability, availability, resiliency, and reliability.
• Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing team of performance engineers, architects, and technical specialists.
• Set clear priorities, goals, and expectations aligned with business and technology objectives.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence, innovation, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Mentor engineers on advanced performance engineering practices, tools, and technologies.
• Support workforce planning, succession planning, and career development.
• Promote strong collaboration across engineering, platform, and operations organizations.

Benefits

• medical
• dental
• vision
• 401(k) retirement savings plan
• time off (including paid time off, company and personal holidays, paid parental and caregiver leave)
• short-term and long-term disability
• life insurance

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior