Lead Performance Test Engineer IV

Job Type Full-time Description Who are we? Western National Insurance Group is a private mutual insurance company with over 120 years of experience serving customers' property-and-casualty insurance needs in the Midwestern, Northwestern, and Southwestern United States. Known as “The Relationship Company®,” we define success as a measure of the relationships we’ve built over time. In everything that we do, we know that delivering a friendly and helpful interaction makes for a better experience for everyone involved. That’s the power of “nice”. At Western National, nice is something we work to bring to every person and organization with whom we partner and serve. Does this opportunity interest you? Western National is seeking a Lead Performance Test Engineer IV to join our team! The individual in this role will act as the senior technical leader for performance testing, influencing strategy standards, and execution. This individual will define and evolve enterprisewide performance testing frameworks, methodologies, and best practices, ensuring consistency, scalability, and alignment with business SLAs. This role applies deep expertise in performance test design, automation, and results analysis to provide actionable insights, mentor practitioners, and enable reliable, high-performing systems across the organization. What are the responsibilities and opportunities of this role? Defines and evolves enterprisewide performance testing strategy, standards, frameworks, and best practices and ensures consistent adoption across teams and portfolios. Establishes and maintains standards for performance test design, execution, environment readiness, and results reporting. Partners with QA leadership to evolve performance testing practices and organizational maturity. Establishes organizational guidance for capturing, validating, and tracing nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) to performance test scenarios and SLA outcomes. Provides expert oversight of workload modeling and the design of load, stress, soak, endurance, and scalability testing approaches for complex systems. Enables and guides teams in the creation, maintenance, and optimization of performance test scripts, test data, and test environments. Mentors and coaches Performance Test Engineers I–III, strengthening test design rigor, analysis quality, and reporting consistency across the organization. Drives enterprise integration of performance testing within CI / CD pipelines to support continuous feedback and early risk identification. Defines performance reporting standards, including dashboards, SLA validation, trend analysis, and executive-level insights derived from performance test results. Leads cross-team root cause analysis using performance test data and evidence and partners with engineering, architecture, and vendors on remediation planning. Oversees performance test environment readiness, including coordination of deployments, data refreshes, monitoring instrumentation, and test stability. Evaluates and recommends performance testing tools, platforms, and reporting solutions to improve coverage, efficiency, and scalability. Provides technical leadership and guidance over performance testing tools, frameworks, methodologies, and reporting standards. Anticipates enterprise-level performance risks and ensures testing approaches address systemic bottlenecks. Leads complex performance investigations by guiding analysis and root cause efforts using structured test evidence. Translates performance test results into actionable, leadership-ready insights that inform risk and release decisions. Consistently acts according to our customer experience standards, including responding quickly, maintaining a positive attitude, building rapport, demonstrating empathy, managing the customer’s expectations, using the proper communication channel for the situation, and taking ownership to ensure the customer’s issue is resolved. Partners with engineering, product, architecture, and leadership stakeholders to ensure performance testing practices validate system reliability, responsiveness, scalability, and SLA adherence across the organization. Provides clear, trusted performance insights that enable informed decision making for releases, risk acceptance, and prioritization. Performs special projects and other duties as assigned. Requirements What are the must-have qualifications for a candidate? Ten-plus years of progressive experience in performance testing of enterprise and customer-facing applications, with demonstrated impact across multiple systems or portfolios. Advanced expertise in performance test design