Performance Quality Engineer

About the role:

At 8am, quality is not a phase—it’s a mindset woven into every conversation, decision, and line of code.  We are looking for a Performance Quality Engineer to own performance observability, define meaningful metrics, and drive data-informed decisions about system behavior under load. You will work directly with Platform Engineering, development teams, and product leadership to surface performance risks before they become customer-facing problems.

You will report to the Senior Director of Quality Engineering and maintain a dotted-line relationship with the Sr. Director of Platform Engineering.

About us:

At 8am, our vision is to power a world where professionals thrive. We start every day on a mission to empower professionals with the most trusted, innovative technology to deliver world-class outcomes for their clients and exceptional financial results for their business. They count on our purpose-built solutions to simplify operations, ensure compliance, and fuel profitable growth, so they can focus on their clients and do more of the work that matters.

Founded in 2005, 8am™ (formerly AffiniPay) is the professional business platform built to help legal, accounting, and other client-focused professionals run stronger, more profitable businesses. Today, more than 250,000 professionals across the U.S. trust 8am to help them work smarter, serve clients better, and unlock their full potential. We have been recognized as one of Inc 5000’s fastest growing companies in the U.S. for 13 years in a row, and as a result, our teams continue to grow as well!

What you'll do:

• Design and create performance test suites for multiple product teams against a microservices-based SaaS platform running on AWS.
• Operate and help maintain production-like environments for performance analysis, diagnosis, and regression testing.
• Analyze application and infrastructure logs to identify, isolate, and help root-cause performance degradations.
• Define, track, and report on performance KPIs (response times, throughput, error rates, resource utilization) and deliver trend analysis and projections to engineering leadership and product stakeholders.
• Use usage and trend data to identify capacity risks and provide recommendations before they impact customers.
• Collaborate with Platform Engineering, DevX, SDET, and Product teams to prioritize and validate performance improvements.
• Partner with Security QE on the overlap between performance and security risk. Load and stress tests reveal how systems degrade under pressure, which is exactly what attackers exploit via DoS and resource-exhaustion vectors. This role will collaborate with Security QE to integrate security-informed scenarios (authentication storms, TLS renegotiation abuse, API rate-limit validation) into performance test plans, and surface high-resource-cost endpoints to security for assessment.
• Identify and define nonfunctional performance tests for CI/CD pipeline gates (Integration, Regression, Post-Deployment). Work with DevX and Platform Engineering to establish pass/fail thresholds that catch regressions before production.
• Contribute to performance engineering standards, runbooks, and best practices within the QE organization.

About you:

• 3+ years of hands-on performance testing and analysis on microservices-based, cloud-hosted (AWS) SaaS platforms.
• Strong analytical skills with a demonstrated ability to move from symptoms to root cause.
• Background in statistical analysis: trend modeling, interpolation, extrapolation, and capacity forecasting.
• Working knowledge of AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, ECS/EKS), Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience with performance testing tools (k6, Gatling, Locust, JMeter, or equivalent).
• Experience with observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog) and log aggregation (ELK Stack, CloudWatch).
• Scripting proficiency in Python or comparable language for test scenarios, data analysis, and light tooling. Coding experience is a plus, but this role prioritizes performance engineering skill over software development depth.
• Comfortable working asynchronously across multiple time zones in a remote-first team.
  
• Demonstrated experience leveraging AI tools and technologies to improve workflows, enhance decision-making, or drive innovation.

Additional Information
The annual salary range for this position is $120,000 to $165,000. The salary range for performing this role outside of the US / Austin / California may differ.  8am is committed to offering competitive, fair and commensurate compensation and has provided an estimated pay range for this role. Actual compensation may vary based on job-related knowledge, skills, experience and education.

Why 8am: 

At 8am, our culture is shaped by the people who bring it to life every day. Together, we build a company rooted in continuous learning, genuine community, holistic wellness, and meaningful engagement—values that empower us as individuals and unite us as a team. Our culture is grounded in our core values: Work Smart, Win Fast; Outshine Ordinary, and We Find a Way. These values drive how we serve our customers and work with each other in a collaborative, inspiring, and empowering environment, every day.

Here’s how we support our 8Team:

• Health Insurance Coverage: We offer our 8Team a variety of medical, dental, and vision plans, designed to fit your needs, including a 100% company-paid HDHP plan for employees.
• Financial perks: We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package including annual bonuses, equity options and 401(k) or RRSP if in Canada, with a company match for all team members.
• Time for what matters: Flexible Time Off, paid holidays, and a parental leave program for our new parents.
• Wellness: Wellness stipends, mental health support, and one-on-one nutrition coaching.
• Learning and Development: Continuous learning through 8am.edu, leadership programs, professional development funds, and individually focused talent development.
• Giving back to the communities around us: Participate in our charitable matching gift program, paid time off for volunteer service, and company-sponsored volunteer events (both local and virtually).
• Engagement: Virtual and in-person team-building events, quarterly award recognition through our Rise & Shine Award of Excellence Program, and our peer-to-peer appreciation platform.

At 8am, we don’t just offer benefits - we create an environment where people can thrive, grow, and make a real impact every day.

Diversity, equity & inclusion at 8am:

At 8am, we recognize that innovation occurs with a strong team of people who are diverse in background, personality, talent and ideas. Experience comes in many forms and ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace where we continue to learn from each other is an integral part of our culture. We are committed to creating a welcoming and transparent environment for all that embraces those differences through education, equal access to opportunities and information, inclusionary programs, and community outreach. 

Security advisory:

Our hiring teams at 8am are dedicated to recruiting top talent that share our passion for serving the professional services industry through innovative financial technology.  As such, our Talent Acquisition Team only follows legitimate hiring practices.  We will always communicate with our candidates using emails with the 8am domain and will never ask for sensitive/personal data during the application process.  All interviews take place over phone call, Zoom/Google Meet or in person.  All offers are communicated verbally by our Talent Acquisition Specialists with a written offer letter as a follow up.