Sr SDET - Performance Testing

About HighLevel:

HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system that gives agencies, entrepreneurs and SMBs the infrastructure to build, automate and scale. Today, HighLevel supports SMBs across 150+ countries, fueling community-driven growth rooted in real customer outcomes.

To date, businesses operating on HighLevel have generated over $7 billion in ecosystem value, demonstrating the impact of shared infrastructure at scale. By centralizing conversations, automation and intelligence into one system, we help businesses move faster, reduce complexity and execute efficiently.

Behind the platform, HighLevel powers more than 4 billion API hits and 2.5 billion message events daily. With 250 terabytes of distributed data, 250+ microservices and over 1 million domain names supported, our architecture is built for performance, resilience and long-term scalability.

Our People

With over 2,000 team members across 10+ countries, HighLevel operates as a global, remote-first organization built for speed and ownership. We value initiative, clarity and execution, creating space for ambitious people to build systems that support millions of businesses worldwide. Here, innovation thrives, ideas are celebrated and people come first, no matter where they call home.

Our Impact

Every month, HighLevel enables more than 1.5 billion messages, 200 million leads and 20 million conversations for the more than 1 million businesses we support. Behind those numbers are real people building independence, expanding opportunity and creating measurable impact. We’re proud to be a part of that.

Learn more about us on our YouTube Channel or Blog Posts.

About the Role:

HighLevel is looking for a Sr. SDET with 5+ years of experience to play a crucial role in ensuring the quality, performance, and scalability of our products. We are seeking engineers who thrive in a fast-paced startup environment, enjoy problem-solving, and stay updated with the latest models and solutions. This is a great opportunity to work on cutting-edge performance testing strategies and contribute to the success of our products.

Responsibilities:

• Performance baselines for critical services: SLIs, SLOs, and latency, throughput, and error-rate targets, plus workload models built from production traffic and real customer behaviour
• A shared performance testing framework and production-like environments (Kubernetes and cloud, test data included) that product-team SDETs can use without starting from scratch, and the evaluation of new tools through PoCs
• Automated performance regression checks in CI/CD, with trend reports that catch regressions before release
• Load, stress, soak, and spike testing, and capacity planning ahead of peak events
• Root cause analysis of bottlenecks across API, database, queue, and frontend layers, using traces, metrics, logs, and profiling, in partnership with development, DevOps, and infrastructure teams
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, concurrency, rate limiting and common performance bottlenecks
• Ability to interpret performance metrics, translate findings into actionable engineering recommendations, and influence technical decisions across engineering teams
• Supervise and mentor junior team members and contribute to capability building initiatives to raise the performance bar across the team

Requirements:

• 5+ years in performance, scalability, or reliability engineering or testing, with examples of finding and fixing bottlenecks in production-scale systems
• Hands-on experience with at least one modern load-testing tool (k6, Gatling, or Locust), including realistic workload modeling and distributed load generation, and strong programming skills in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Java
• Experience using observability tooling (for example New Relic, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry) to isolate root cause across API, database, and queue layers, with a solid grasp of REST service performance, concurrency, and caching
• Experience integrating performance tests into CI/CD pipelines with pass/fail thresholds
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and at least one major cloud (GCP, AWS, or Azure) to deploy and debug test environments

Nice to Have:

• Runtime profiling and thread or heap analysis on the JVM or Node.js (GC behavior, event-loop lag)
• Frontend performance experience: Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse, real user monitoring
• Experience applying AI-assisted tooling to test design or result analysis
• Experience with NoSQL or search datastores and message brokers at scale
• Chaos or resilience testing, and safe testing in production (canaries, shadow traffic)