Associate Director Engineering - Enterprise Performance Engineering

Humana•New York, MA

2d•$142,300 - $195,700•Remote

About The Position

Humana’s Associate Director, Software Engineering (Enterprise Performance Engineering) is a senior technology leader who advances enterprise performance engineering capabilities. The role leads a centralized team providing performance testing, analysis, workload modeling, capacity planning, resilience testing, and consulting across business and technology portfolios. The leader establishes performance engineering as a strategic capability so application teams can deliver scalable, resilient, highly available, and high-performing solutions. The position combines people leadership with technical expertise and shapes performance engineering standards, tools, methodologies, and best practices. It requires substantial experience in enterprise application performance testing, cloud performance engineering, observability platforms, AI application performance validation, and modern distributed architectures. The role partners across Engineering, Architecture, Infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, Quality Engineering, Data Engineering, AI Engineering, and Product, embedding scalability, resiliency, observability, and performance throughout the software development lifecycle. The Associate Director leads performance engineering strategy, centralized services, test approaches, architecture and optimization work, AI application performance practices, tool and automation adoption, and cloud performance and reliability efforts. The role also leads, coaches, and develops performance engineers, architects, and technical specialists. This is a remote position with occasional travel to Humana offices for training or meetings. Scheduled hours are 40 per week.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.
At least 10 years of experience in software engineering, performance engineering, quality engineering, or related disciplines.
At least 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, or Performance Center.
Strong expertise in performance analysis, capacity planning, workload modeling, and application tuning.
Experience optimizing web applications, APIs, microservices, distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, and 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, or New Relic.
Ability to lead through influence, partner across organizations, and remain hands-on in technical problem solving.
For home or hybrid home/office work, self-provided internet must provide at least 25 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload; wireless, wired cable, or DSL is suggested. Humana may require an internet service upgrade if necessary.
For home or hybrid home/office work, use a dedicated space without ongoing interruptions to protect member PHI/HIPAA information.

Nice To Haves

Experience in healthcare, insurance, financial services, or another highly regulated industry.
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 establishing or maturing 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 the enterprise performance engineering strategy, roadmap, and operating model in alignment with engineering objectives.
Establish and mature performance engineering standards, methodologies, frameworks, governance practices, and best practices across the software development lifecycle.
Lead a centralized performance engineering team supporting multiple business segments and technology portfolios.
Advise application teams and technology leaders on scalability, reliability, system performance, performance risks, and scalability challenges.
Establish standards for load, stress, endurance, capacity, failover, and resilience testing.
Lead performance engineering services for customer-facing, internal, digital, cloud-native, AI-enabled, and mission-critical applications across design, development, testing, deployment, and production readiness.
Define enterprise-scale performance test strategies, workload models, and testing approaches; oversee performance validation activities including load, stress, volume, spike, endurance, scalability, capacity, reliability, and disaster recovery performance testing.
Integrate performance testing into Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD delivery pipelines and establish repeatable, measurable, increasingly automated validation practices.
Partner with Architecture and Engineering to embed performance considerations in application and platform design; lead performance analysis and tuning across complex applications and platforms.
Conduct root cause analysis of performance issues involving applications, databases, infrastructure, APIs, and cloud services, and recommend optimizations to architecture, databases, APIs, cloud resources, distributed systems, caching, messaging, and networks.
Guide teams in designing scalable, resilient, performance-optimized solutions and establish performance engineering reviews and architecture assessments for critical initiatives.
Establish performance engineering practices and testing methodologies for AI-powered applications, Generative AI platforms, LLM applications, workflows, and autonomous agents.
Lead validation of AI model response times, agent execution performance, prompt latency, throughput scalability, multi-agent orchestration, resource utilization, and cost-performance; develop related frameworks, benchmarks, and approaches.
Lead selection and adoption of performance testing tools, frameworks, and automation; develop reusable frameworks, scripts, templates, and accelerators and integrate automated validation into CI/CD pipelines.
Improve testing efficiency through automation, analytics, AI-assisted performance engineering, and continuous performance testing; align practices with the broader software delivery toolchain.
Lead performance engineering across AWS and Azure; establish cloud testing models for microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, and containerized platforms.
Collaborate with Infrastructure Engineering, Platform Engineering, and SRE teams to optimize cloud resource use and application performance and support cloud modernization performance validation.
Ensure systems meet enterprise expectations for scalability, availability, resiliency, and reliability.
Lead, coach, and develop performance engineers, architects, and technical specialists; set priorities, goals, and expectations aligned with business and technology objectives.
Foster technical excellence, innovation, accountability, and continuous learning; mentor engineers and support workforce planning, succession planning, and career development.
Promote collaboration across engineering, platform, and operations organizations.