It's a new day with a new opportunity at 8am!
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: