Staff Software Engineer – Performance & Reliability (Cloud Platform) - hybrid

CyberArk•Santa Clara, CA

10h•Hybrid

About The Position

CyberArk is seeking a Staff-level SDET / Performance & Reliability Engineer to define and drive performance engineering as a core discipline across our cloud-native platform. This role goes beyond implementing tests — you will own the strategy, architecture, and adoption of performance and reliability practices across multiple teams. You will build systems, frameworks, and standards that enable engineers to understand and improve system behavior at scale. You will operate at the intersection of quality, production engineering, and distributed systems, partnering closely with development teams, Test Enablement, and Production Engineering to ensure our platform is scalable, observable, and production-ready. Performance requirements are often implicit — you will help define what should be tested, how to measure it, and how to operationalize it across teams.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in SDET, performance engineering, backend engineering, or related roles
Strong coding skills in Go, Java, or Python, with experience building test frameworks or system-level tooling
Proven experience designing performance testing systems, not just executing tests
Deep understanding of performance testing methodologies (load, stress, soak, spike, etc.)
Deep understanding of workload modeling and traffic patterns
Deep understanding of latency (p50/p90/p99), throughput, and system behavior under load
Experience working with distributed systems and cloud-native architectures
Strong experience with observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, etc.)
Experience integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines at scale
Solid understanding of Linux systems and networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S)

Nice To Haves

Experience building or extending custom load testing frameworks (k6, Locust, Gatling, etc.)
Experience with containerized environments and orchestration (Kubernetes)
Familiarity with cloud infrastructure behavior under load (autoscaling, load balancing, storage systems)
Experience in security-sensitive or SaaS platforms
Exposure to PKI, certificate management, or identity systems
Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible)

Responsibilities

Define and drive performance testing strategy across services and teams, establishing standards for scalability and reliability
Design and build performance testing frameworks and infrastructure for distributed, cloud-native systems
Lead the development of reusable tooling for load generation, traffic modeling, result analysis, and regression detection
Establish performance baselines, SLIs/SLOs, and measurable success criteria across services
Partner with engineering teams to embed performance testing into development workflows and CI/CD pipelines
Analyze system behavior under load and identify bottlenecks across application, infrastructure, and data layers
Use observability tools to interpret latency distributions, throughput, and failure patterns, and translate findings into actionable improvements
Drive adoption of performance practices across teams, acting as a technical leader and subject matter expert
Influence system design by advocating for scalability, resilience, and production readiness early in the development lifecycle
Mentor engineers and SDETs on performance engineering principles and best practices