Performance Engineering Manager

Ford Credit is seeking a Performance Engineering Manager to lead the performance engineering practice within the Test Center of Excellence (TCoE). This leadership role combines deep technical expertise in performance testing and engineering with the ability to manage a team, drive strategy, and deliver results across Ford Credit's entire application portfolio: the Industrial Bank, Platform Modernization (Alfa Systems), Ford Bill, and future initiatives. You will own the performance testing strategy, the team that executes it, and the engineering practices that make performance continuous, automated, and observable. Your work directly protects Ford Credit from production performance incidents, SLA violations, capacity planning failures, and degraded customer experiences.

What You'll Do...

• Own and evolve the Ford Credit Performance Testing Strategy, including the annual roadmap and multi-year vision (Foundation, Optimization, Maturity phases)
• Build, manage, and mentor a team of performance engineers; conduct hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, and career development planning
• Lead the gathering of Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) with product, architecture, and engineering teams, including workload models, SLAs, and test scenarios
• Direct the execution of all performance test types: load, stress, endurance, spike, volume, scalability, component, integration, regression, and browser performance testing
• Establish and enforce performance quality gates within CI/CD pipelines, preventing deployments when SLAs are not met
• Build and maintain continuous performance testing pipelines and Grafana/PowerBI dashboards for trend monitoring and executive reporting
• Own performance testing environment readiness, coordinating with FCSRE and infrastructure teams on provisioning, sizing, and capacity planning
• Deliver performance risk assessments, capacity planning recommendations, and production readiness evaluations to LL6+ leadership
• Foster AI-first engineering practices within the team for script generation, anomaly detection, and workflow automation
• Coordinate with FCSRE, Development, Product, Business, and third-party vendors on performance requirements and production readiness

You'll Have... 

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• 8+ years of hands-on performance testing and engineering experience, preferably in financial services or complex enterprise platforms
• 3+ years managing a performance engineering or test engineering team
• Expert-level proficiency with JMeter and/or LoadRunner; experience with distributed load generation
• Strong proficiency in scripting languages (Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript)
• Hands-on experience with GCP, observability tools (Grafana, Dynatrace, InfluxDB), and CI/CD integration (CloudBuild, GitHub Actions)
• Deep understanding of distributed system architectures: microservices, API gateways, GraphQL orchestration, database performance (PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2)
• Demonstrated experience authoring and delivering a performance testing strategy with measurable outcomes
• Active use of AI tools for performance engineering efficiency (scenario generation, anomaly detection, capacity planning, report automation)
• Understanding of lending/financial data domains: loan lifecycle, payment processing, availability SLAs, disaster recovery RPO/RTO
• Familiarity with NFRs beyond performance: reliability, availability, scalability, chaos engineering, and distributed tracing
• Excellent communication skills; ability to translate complex performance data into business-impact narratives for non-technical stakeholders

Even better, you may have...

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• Experience in the automotive, banking, or lending/fintech industry
• Kubernetes/container orchestration experience (GKE) and cloud-native performance tuning
• Familiarity with chaos engineering tools (Gremlin, Chaos Monkey) and resilience testing practices
• Exposure to shift-left performance testing and performance-as-code practices
• Experience with synthetic monitoring and real-user monitoring (RUM) tools
• Vendor/third-party performance test management experience (SOWs, SLAs, offshore/onshore coordination)
• A relevant certification (e.g., Certified Performance Tester, AWS/GCP Professional, ISTQB Performance Testing)
• Experience presenting technical risk assessments to senior/executive leadership (LL6+)
• Prior experience standing up a Test Center of Excellence or performance practice from the ground up

You may not check every box, or your experience may look a little different from what we've outlined, but if you think you can bring value to Ford Motor Company, we encourage you to apply!

As an established global company, we offer the benefit of choice. You can choose what your Ford future will look like: will your story span the globe, or keep you close to home? Will your career be a deep dive into what you love, or a series of new teams and new skills? Will you be a leader, a changemaker, a technical expert, a culture builder…or all of the above? No matter what you choose, we offer a work life that works for you, including:

• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care and more
• Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and more
• Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases
• Tuition assistance
• Established and active employee resource groups
• Paid time off for individual and team community service
• A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day
• Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.

This position is leadership level 6 and ranges from $115,500-$218,100.

Final determination of salary grade will be based on candidate's skills and experience, and base salary will be set within the applicable range according to job scope, responsibility and competitive market value.

For more information on salary and benefits, click here: https://fordcareers.co/LL6

Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

Candidates for positions with Ford Motor Company must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Verification of employment eligibility will be required at the time of hire.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, age, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status or protected veteran status. In the United States, if you need a reasonable accommodation for the online application process due to a disability, please call 1-888-336-0660.

This position is hybrid with a requirement to be onsite four or more days per week. #LI-Hybrid

#LI-FordCredit #LI-DH1