Lead IT Engineer Digital Performance

Ulta Beauty, Inc. • Bolingbrook, IL

4h

About The Position

Live the experience. From professional empowerment to continual learning opportunities. From ongoing investment in new and emerging technologies to a career of self-determination. At Ulta Beauty, our tech team is critical to our scalability—and is recognized that way. We’ve been defined as a “mature start-up.” A place where interdepartmental exposure, open doors, and genuine collaboration is ubiquitous. Where challenges come fast and furious, requiring agility, mental dexterity, and creativity. Where our passion for better solutions drives us and is core to who we are.
We’re engineering for the future of retail, and it’s no-holds-barred. But for those motivated by continual change and ambiguity, by superior leadership, by whip smart colleagues who will press you daily for your very best, you’ll find that virtually nothing’s impossible at Ulta Beauty.
THE IMPACT YOU CAN HAVE:
The Lead IT Engineer – Digital Performance owns the end-to-end performance, scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency of Ulta Beauty’s digital ecosystem—including web, mobile, APIs, microservices, SaaS platforms, cloud infrastructure, and emerging AI/agentic experiences. This role ensures that all digital products meet defined performance SLOs/SLIs, scale reliably during peak/holiday events, and deliver fast, consistent, and high-quality customers and associate experiences.
The role provides technical leadership across performance engineering disciplines, enabling shift-left performance practices, production performance strategies, observability patterns, and agentic/AI workload readiness. This position partners closely with Architecture, Engineering, SRE, Infrastructure, and Product teams to establish and maintain performance excellence across the SDLC

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, MIS/CIS or equivalent professional experience
• Must have Performance Engineering and testing as the primary competency and comfortable to act as a hands-on lead and by managing a performance test team spread across onshore & offshore
• Must have 8+ years of progressive performance testing experience in agile, waterfall and hybrid delivery models using load emulation tools like LoadRunner, JMeter, NeoLoad, CloudTest etc.…
• Expert level proficiency in Estimation, NFR gathering, Test Plan, Workload models, Test Scenario Design, Test Environment setup, Test Data Setup, Test Execution, debugging and tuning the application bottlenecks and Defect Management covering complex end to end flows.
• Strong Performance Engineering experience with technologies like Java EE, Python, Micro Services, SQL, No-SQL, GCP, Apigee, Kafka, Docker and Kubernetes in developing automated testing frameworks, working with cloud platforms (GCP, Azure and AWS), and implementing automation solutions.
• Experience in performance testing of both on-prem and cloud solutions (GCP/Azure/AWS)
• Experience in Performance Engineering concepts along with an ability to define performance monitoring requirements and alert thresholds using APM and Real User metrics tools like Dynatrace, NewRelic, Dynatrace RUM and Webpage Test.
• Understanding and experience with DevOps and CI/CD pipelines
• Ability to perform root cause analysis by coordinating with the respective teams and bring issues to closure with acceptable resolutions in a timely manner
• Ability to manage through conflicting priorities and tight deadlines, while maintaining quality deliverables across projects
• Must be results oriented, and demonstrate a ‘can‐do’ attitude with attention to detail and with excellent written, verbal, relationship-building and problem-solving skills
• Flexibility of providing support during odd hours, weekends, and peak seasons
• Minimal travel required (training/conferences)

Nice To Haves

• Performance testing experience in a retail domain covering systems like eCommerce / Web / Mobile, Order management & POS systems is highly desired

Responsibilities

• Own performance outcomes across web, mobile, APIs, SaaS, microservices, cloud platforms, and AI-driven/agentic experiences.
• Define performance strategy, SLOs/SLIs, KPIs, and readiness criteria for all digital experiences.
• Lead capacity, scalability, resilience, and peak-readiness strategy—including holidays and major launch events.
• Drive shift-left performance engineering through design reviews, architecture assessments, and early workload modeling.
• Architect and implement performance engineering frameworks across the SDLC, including automated performance checks within CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead performance test planning, workload modeling, scenario design, environment strategy, and data strategy.
• Develop reusable performance test assets and automation using LoadRunner, JMeter, NeoLoad, CloudTest, and modern cloud-native tooling.
• Conduct detailed analysis of system, API, and mobile performance signals including latency, throughput, core web vitals, RUM metrics, microservices behaviors, and third‑party dependency impacts.
• Partner with SRE and Ops teams to establish observability dashboards, alert thresholds, and deep-dive diagnostics.
• Define performance validation frameworks for agentic and AI-driven interactions—covering multi-step journeys, decision loops, retries, fallbacks, and asynchronous flows.
• Build workload models for agentic use cases including burst traffic, fan‑out patterns, long‑running sessions, and async callbacks.
• Evaluate latency, concurrency, cost models, and dynamic execution paths for AI-enabled systems.
• Develop performance gates ensuring AI/agentic systems remain reliable, cost-efficient, and scalable.
• Serve as the performance engineering thought leader and primary point of accountability for all performance readiness activities.
• Partner cross-functionally with Engineering, Architecture, SRE, Infrastructure, and Product teams to embed performance into all phases of development.
• Provide hands-on leadership to onshore/offshore performance engineering teams.
• Communicate risks, findings, and recommendations clearly to technical and business stakeholders.
• Lead ongoing production performance monitoring, trend analysis, optimization, and incident support.
• Ensure systems remain peak-ready throughout the year with proactive scaling and tuning strategies.
• Standardize performance engineering processes, tools, best practices, and governance.
• Drive continuous improvement through innovation in cloud-native performance techniques, observability, and AI-driven analysis.
• Profile application performance using different workload models to understand performance concerns and to implement tuning as needed.
• Evaluate performance related patterns and trends.
• Drive performance engineering as an integral part of SDLC.
• Contribution to continuous improvement of performance testing standards and processes.

Benefits

• Full-time positions are eligible for paid time off, health, dental, vision, life and disability benefits.
• Part-time positions are eligible for dental, vision, life, and disability benefits.

What This Job Offers

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