Senior Performance Engineering and Observability Lead

Role Description

We are seeking a Performance Engineering & Observability Lead who elevates how teams think about quality across the enterprise. The focus is on shaping test strategy, guiding performance and automation, strengthening CI/CD quality signals, and enabling teams to build resilient, performant features from the start. Success is measured by improved reliability, faster feedback, and confident delivery at scale.

Your influence goes beyond writing tests—you’ll elevate how multiple teams across our ecosystem think about resilience, performance, and customer impact. You’ll help build smarter test strategies, strengthen service-level automation, and establish the patterns, tooling, and guardrails that keep our distributed architecture dependable. You’ll collaborate with engineers, product leaders, and platform teams to ensure our teams ship with confidence and perform flawlessly under real-world conditions.

You’ll begin by building a strong understanding of our service landscape, React front end, customer journeys, and operational rhythms. From there, you’ll lead performance initiatives across teams—developing k6-based performance tests (JavaScript), Playwright-driven synthetic journeys, meaningful performance budgets, and the observability practices that enable quick diagnosis and confident releases.

This isn’t a “performance team tests at the end” role. Delivery teams own quality and performance. Your role is to enable, guide, and elevate—making performance a natural part of how teams build software every day.

Your mission is simple: protect the customer experience by helping teams consistently deliver fast, stable, and peak-ready services and web experiences.

What You’ll Influence

• Quality mindset embedded early in discovery and design
• Performance-Driven Engineering Practices - stability, and readiness
• Automation strategy across UI, API, mobile, and integrations
• Scalable test patterns, tooling, and guardrails across squads
• Quality gates and feedback loops within CI/CD

What Will You Do?

• Lead With a Performance Mindset
  • Drive early conversations around latency expectations, scalability assumptions, failure modes, and peak scenarios
  • Help teams translate customer experience goals into clear performance targets: API latency budgets, journey-level budgets, and Core Web Vitals thresholds
  • Identify and communicate risks across service dependencies, caching behavior, data access patterns, and front-end rendering paths
• Lead Performance Engineering Across Services and Web
  • Guide performance strategy execution across microservices, APIs, event flows, and React user journeys
  • Help teams adopt consistent approaches to workload modeling, test execution, and result interpretation
• Elevate How Teams Test and Build
  • Design practical, efficient test strategies for high-confidence delivery
  • Expand Performance & automation where it delivers leverage and reduces manual effort
  • Promote reusable patterns that scale quality across teams
  • Performance evaluation at every stage
• Drive Performance, Stability, and Readiness
  • Lead readiness for major releases and seasonal traffic spikes
  • Forecast risks and validate resilience under load
• Performance Strategy & Architecture
  • Define and maintain NFRs (SLIs/SLOs, latency targets, throughput goals)
  • Model workloads, concurrency levels, and peak-event projections
  • Partner with architects to validate scalability and resilience patterns early
• Performance Design & Execution
  • Build and execute performance, load, stress, and endurance tests
  • Design realistic cross-service performance scenarios
  • Validate caching, queuing, retry, and rate-limit behavior under load
• Strengthen Observability and Performance Diagnostics
  • Ensure services and web journeys are observable using:
    • Dynatrace for distributed tracing and service metrics
    • Splunk for log analysis and correlation
    • FullStory for experience insights and session replay
  • Help teams connect performance metrics to customer outcomes (latency, errors, drop-offs).
  • Lead or support investigation of latency regressions and performance incidents.
• Performance in CI/CD
  • Implement automated performance smoke checks and regression triggers
  • Integrate performance baselines and fail-fast rules into pipelines
  • Build reusable, version-controlled performance-as-code assets
• Scalability, Resilience & Reliability Engineering
  • Lead readiness evaluation for peak events and major feature rollouts
  • Conduct chaos testing, failure injection, and failover validation
  • Partner with SRE to enhance auto-scaling and resource tuning practices
• Optimization & Cost Efficiency
  • Analyze resource usage to recommend cost-optimized infrastructure
  • Validate AKS scaling, caching tiers, DB performance, and async patterns
• Shape and Evolve Automation
  • Guide architecture for UI, API, mobile, and integration test frameworks
  • Ensure reliability and maintainability aligned with team needs
  • Support early, shift-left adoption of automation in the lifecycle
• Advance Test data management
  • Support with data management tools and methodologies, including designing, building, and maintaining custom data management solutions

What Will You Bring?

• 10+ years in Quality/Performance Engineering, SRE, Full Stack Development
• 5+ years leading performance strategy, performance testing, observability, or reliability initiatives
• Strong hands-on experience with performance/load testing tools (e.g., K6, JMeter, Neoload, Locust or similar)
• Hands-on experience with Playwright (JavaScript or TypeScript)
• Ability to model real-world workloads, define latency/throughput targets, and execute end-to-end performance scenarios
• Experience with stress, endurance, spike, scalability, and soak testing
• Strong understanding of service-level objectives/SLIs, latency budgets, and distributed-system performance patterns
• Hands-on expertise with observability platforms: Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana, OpenTelemetry
• Strong understanding of cloud-native distributed systems: Kubernetes / AKS, containers, service mesh concepts
• Experience with customer-facing applications and API testing (REST and GraphQL) for Services.
• Contributing tests into CI/CD workflows (e.g., GitLab)
• Agile, cross-functional team experience; strong communication and collaboration
• Quality-first mindset with clear risk, strategy, and customer impact instincts

Preferred Qualifications

• Running tests in containerized or Kubernetes environments
• Experience with Micro Frontend architectures and front-end build tooling (Node.js/NPM)
• Experience with backend architectures and back-end build tooling (Springboot)
• Experience with cloud (AKS) and infrastructure as code
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or equivalent experience

Benefits

• Incentive bonus program
• 401(K) savings plan with company match
• Annual companywide review process
• Flexible spending accounts
• Medical, dental and vision insurance
• Life and disability insurance
• Associate assistance program
• Paid parental and adoption leave
• Access to fertility and adoption benefits through Carrot
• Access to mental health and wellness app, Headspace
• Paid Caregiver Leave
• Mobile Stipend
• Paid time off and one paid volunteer day per year, allowing you to give back to your community
• Work from anywhere (Mondays and Fridays are “work from anywhere” days for most roles and six work from anywhere weeks per year)
• Seven associate wellness half days per year
• Merchandise discount on all of our brands
• Opportunities for career advancement, we believe in promoting from within
• Access to multiple Associate Resource Groups
• Global team of people who will celebrate you for being YOU!

Company Description

Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (A&F Co.) is a global, digitally led omnichannel specialty retailer of apparel and accessories catering to kids through millennials with assortments curated for their specific lifestyle needs.

The company operates a family of brands, including Abercrombie brands and Hollister brands, each sharing a commitment to offer products of enduring quality and exceptional comfort that support global customers on their journey to being and becoming who they are. Abercrombie & Fitch Co. operates stores under these brands across North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, as well as the e-commerce sites abercrombie.com, abercrombiekids.com and hollisterco.com.

Learn more about A&F Co. by visiting our corporate website.

ABERCROMBIE & FITCH CO. IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER.