Job Description
Description
Performance Center of Excellence Lead
Location: Remote or Hybrid to Wayne, PA
Frontline's Performance Center of Excellence Lead partners across Platform, SRE, and product
engineering teams to raise the performance and scalability bar for the systems that power K-12
districts nationwide. In this role, you will build and lead Frontline Education's performance
engineering practice — establishing the standards, tooling, and testing methodology that our
engineering organization uses to validate that our products perform reliably under real-world load.
This is a center-of-excellence model focused on organizational capability-building, not large-scale
team management. You will operate as Frontline's performance engineering authority: leading
enablement and education across teams, establishing standards and maturity practices, reporting
on adoption progress, and embedding directly on high-priority initiatives where performance risk
is highest. You will also manage an existing performance QA practitioner who will contribute to
hands-on performance testing and tooling work. Success depends on influence, technical credibility,
and the ability to scale performance engineering practices across teams you don't directly manage.
The Performance COE Lead will report to the VP of Platform and Architecture and will work in close
partnership with SRE, Platform Engineering, and product engineering leaders to ensure
performance is treated as a first-class engineering discipline — not an afterthought validated late in
the delivery cycle.
Key Responsibilities
Center of Excellence Leadership
•
Define and own Frontline's performance engineering charter, standards, maturity model,
and enablement framework across the product portfolio. This includes establishing self-
serviceable playbooks, tooling guidance, and educational resources that allow teams to
conduct performance engineering independently.
•
•
•
Conduct performance maturity assessments of product and platform teams, identifying gaps
in testing coverage, tooling, and readiness for scale.
Establish a repeatable framework for evaluating performance risk ahead of major releases,
customer onboarding events, and infrastructure changes.
Build and maintain relationships with Platform, SRE, and product engineering leadership to
ensure performance practices are adopted consistently, not just recommended.
Standards, Tooling & Methodology
•
Select, standardize, and maintain the performance, load, and resilience testing toolchain
used across engineering (e.g., load generation, observability, results analysis).
•
Develop testing methodology that reflects real customer traffic patterns — including
scenarios like concentrated egress from K-12 district networks — rather than idealized
synthetic load.
•
Define clear performance benchmarks, SLOs, and acceptance criteria that product teams can
self-serve against.
•
Maintain a library of reusable test plans, scripts, and playbooks to reduce duplicated effort
across teams.
•
Author and maintain reusable agentic skills and agents that support automated test plan
generation, smart load-testing orchestration, and performance analysis—enabling teams to
conduct performance engineering with AI assistance
Embedded Engagement
•
Embed directly with engineering teams on high-priority, high-risk initiatives — including
new customer onboarding, major architectural changes, and known scaling pain points —
to provide hands-on performance testing leadership.
•
•
Lead technical discovery with product and platform teams (and customers, where relevant)
to uncover performance risks before they surface in production.
Act as a technical partner during incident retrospectives where performance or scale was a
contributing factor, translating findings into standard updates.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
•
Partner structurally with SRE and DevOps on observability architecture, load-testing
infrastructure design, and operational tooling. Co-design approaches to ensure performance
engineering is operationalized: observability stack supports performance analysis, load-
testing environments are reproducible and realistic, and SLOs inform capacity planning and
incident response.
•
•
Collaborate with product engineering teams early in the development lifecycle so
performance testing is planned in, not bolted on.
Represent the performance practice in architecture review and planning forums, providing
input on scalability implications of proposed designs.
Continuous Improvement
•
•
•
Track adoption of performance standards and maturity progress across teams, reporting
trends to the VP of Platform and Architecture.
Stay current on performance engineering tooling, cloud-scale testing practices, and industry
benchmarks; bring new techniques into Frontline's practice.
Continuously refine the maturity model and standards based on lessons learned from
embedded engagements and production incidents.
Enablement, Education & Standards Communication
•
•
•
•
Build and maintain a library of reusable test plans, scripts, playbooks, and observability
dashboards that teams can self-serve
Create and deliver performance engineering education (documentation, workshops,
reference implementations) to scale organizational capability
Define clear performance benchmarks, SLOs, and acceptance criteria that product and
platform teams can adopt and measure against
Maintain a maturity model scorecard tracking adoption across teams and reporting
progress to leadership quarterly
Required Qualifications
•
8+ years of experience in performance engineering, load testing, or site reliability, with a
demonstrated track record of building or scaling a performance practice in a SaaS or
enterprise software environment.
•
•
Deep hands-on technical expertise with load, longevity, and performance testing tools (e.g.,
JMeter, Gatling, k6, Locust) and observability/monitoring platforms.
Strong understanding of distributed systems and cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, or GCP),
including how network topology, authentication flows, and infrastructure design affect
performance under load.
•
Deep experience partnering with SRE/DevOps teams on observability architecture,
infrastructure design, and operational tooling; comfort translating between performance
engineering and infrastructure constraints
•
•
•
•
Proven ability to influence without direct authority — experience driving adoption of
engineering standards and practices across teams you don't manage.
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate technical performance findings
into clear risk assessments for both engineering teams and executive stakeholders.
Experience conducting or leading technical discovery, maturity assessments, or audits of
engineering practices is strongly preferred.
Experience in K-12 EdTech or another high-concurrency, seasonally-spiky SaaS vertical is a
plus, given the unique traffic patterns of school district environments.
Personal Attributes
•
Hands-On Credibility: Comfortable moving between deep technical work (writing test
scripts, analyzing load results) and advising senior engineering leadership.
•
Organizational Impact Mindset: Measures success by adoption and capability lift across the
organization, not just embedded project wins. Comfortable reporting on maturity progress
and translating technical findings into business/leadership language.
•
•
•
Consultative: Builds trust and adoption through partnership and evidence, not mandate —
critical in a role without direct authority over the teams it influences.
Detail-Oriented: Notices the gap between what a team believes is tested and what is actually
validated.
Pragmatic: Prioritizes the highest-risk performance gaps rather than pursuing exhaustive
coverage everywhere at once.
Why Frontline Education
Frontline Education is a pioneer of school administration software purpose-built for K-12 districts.
We provide innovative, connected solutions for student and special programs, business operations,
and human capital management with powerful data and analytics to empower educators and
administrators. We earn the trust of K-12 leaders across the U.S. by serving as a consistently high-
performing, forthright partner of school districts through every dimension of the company.
At Frontline, we value diversity, equity, and inclusivity, and are committed to building a workplace
that respects, supports, and values the identities of all our employees. We offer a competitive
compensation package, including a base salary, a rewarding bonus structure, 401k match, unlimited
PTO, and opportunities for career advancement.
Apply Today
If you're a performance engineering leader who thrives on building practices that scale beyond
your own headcount and want your work to directly protect the reliability of software used by
teachers and administrators nationwide, we encourage you to apply for the Performance Center of
Excellence Lead position at Frontline Education.
Our Mission, Our People, Our Purpose
At Frontline Education, we’re reimagining what’s possible by becoming an AI-first
organization, transforming how we think, work, and serve the educators who shape our
schools every day. By using AI in thoughtful, practical ways, we’re creating tools that help
educators save time, gain insights, and focus more on what matters most, their students.
As part of our team, you’ll be expected and empowered to build and apply AI skillsets that
grow with you, because at Frontline Education, technology amplifies what matters most:
the human drive to learn, improve, and make a difference.
Compensation & Benefits
• Bonus eligibility
• 401(k) with company match
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
• Employee stock purchase plan
• Generous paid time off and tuition reimbursement
Inclusion, Belonging & Equal Opportunity
Frontline Education is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. We aspire to have
an inclusive workplace and strongly encourage suitably qualified applicants from a wide
range of backgrounds to apply and join our team.
Interview Process & Data Privacy
As part of our interview process, Frontline uses video conferencing tools that include
photo capture and may include automated transcription features. A screenshot or photo
will be taken at the start of the interview for internal identification and record-keeping
purposes only, and transcription may be used to support notetaking and evaluation
consistency. These materials are used solely by our recruiting and hiring teams, stored
securely, and not shared outside the hiring process. Candidates may opt out of the
transcription at any time by notifying their recruiter in advance. Frontline processes this
information in accordance with applicable data privacy laws and only for legitimate
business purposes related to recruitment and hiring.
Our Privacy Policy: Your privacy is important to us. Click here to read our general Privacy
Statement, and click here to read our Applicant Privacy Statement.
Numbers & Facts
| Location | (Remote) |
| Job Type | Full-time |
Skills
Level up your application
Professional resume templates
Browse dozens of recruiter approved resume templates, layouts and formats. Choose your favorite and make it your own in minutes.
Free resume templatesResume Builder
Improve your existing resume or start from scratch and create a standout, ATS-friendly resume. Add job-specific content, download and apply.
Resume Builder