Lead Performance Engineer

About Williams-Sonoma, Inc.

Founded in 1956 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Williams-Sonoma, Inc. is a Fortune 500, digital-first, multi-channel specialty retailer. Our company vision is to own the home and the places where our customers work, stay, and play. We bring the latest home furnishing trends to life for customers through the individual lenses of our ten distinct brands, each serving different life stages and rooms of the home and beyond. Our brands include Williams Sonoma, Williams Sonoma Home, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Pottery Barn Teen, West Elm, Rejuvenation, Mark & Graham, GreenRow, and Dormify.

With more than 500 retail stores globally and multiple international franchise operations, technology is a core driver of our business strategy. We build and operate in-house platforms powering e-commerce, supply chain, merchandising, analytics, and customer experience ecosystems worldwide.

Engineers at the Williams-Sonoma India Technology Center build and scale digital commerce platforms that power these global brands, serving millions of customers worldwide.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Performance Engineering Architect to lead performance engineering initiatives across global digital platforms. This role is responsible for defining performance strategy, driving execution, and embedding performance-first thinking across the software development lifecycle to ensure systems deliver exceptional scalability, reliability, and performance at enterprise scale.

Impact of the Role

• Performance risks identified before production.

• Clear workload models tied to business volumes.

• High-quality executive reporting.

• Efficient offshore execution with minimal rework.

• Measurable improvement in production stability and scalability.

Technology Platforms You Will Work On

• JMeter

• Gatling

• LoadRunner

• AppDynamics

• Dynatrace

• New Relic

• JVM/GC tuning

• Thread pools and connection pooling

• Database performance tuning basics

• Microservices and distributed systems

• Cloud environments (AWS/Azure/GCP)

• CI/CD integration for performance testing

• HTTP/S

• REST APIs

• Kafka or messaging systems

• Kubernetes container environments

Key Responsibilities

• Lead performance engineering initiatives starting from the requirements and design phase.

• Gather performance requirements from business stakeholders, including SLAs, SLOs, and business KPIs.

• Gather performance requirements from Product Owners.

• Gather performance requirements from Architects.

• Gather performance requirements from Infrastructure teams.

• Gather performance requirements from Security teams.

• Gather performance requirements from Production support teams.

• Define performance testing strategy.

• Define test approach, including load, stress, soak, spike, scalability, and failover.

• Define entry and exit criteria.

• Define performance acceptance benchmarks.

• Define NFR traceability matrix.

• Identify performance risks early in the SDLC and recommend mitigation strategies.

• Translate business transactions into workload models.

• Define user concurrency models.

• Define transaction mix.

• Define peak vs. average traffic.

• Define growth projections.

• Perform capacity estimation and recommend infrastructure sizing.

• Collaborate with architecture teams to validate scalability patterns, including microservices, APIs, event-driven systems, etc.

• Create detailed performance test plans, including scope, duration of each test cycle, environment requirements, data requirements, and tooling strategy.

• Define execution schedule aligned with release timelines.

• Coordinate with offshore Performance Engineers to prepare scripts.

• Coordinate with offshore Performance Engineers to execute tests.

• Coordinate with offshore Performance Engineers to monitor test runs.

• Coordinate with offshore Performance Engineers to collect results.

• Provide technical guidance and review scripts for quality and maintainability.

• Define performance testing tool strategy, such as JMeter, Gatling, and LoadRunner.

• Integrate APM/monitoring tools, such as AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and New Relic.

• Establish monitoring dashboards across the application layer, middleware, database, infrastructure, and network.

• Ensure observability alignment with production monitoring.

• Define performance reporting framework, including real-time dashboards, executive summary reports, and detailed analysis reports.

• Provide bottleneck analysis.

• Provide root cause hypotheses.

• Provide tuning recommendations.

• Present findings to senior leadership and architecture boards.

• Translate technical findings into business impact terms.

• Establish performance engineering standards and reusable frameworks.

• Define shift-left performance practices.

• Create templates for test strategy documents, workload models, reports, and risk assessments.

• Drive continuous improvement and automation in the performance testing lifecycle.

• Break down strategic plans into execution tasks for offshore engineers.

• Conduct knowledge transfer sessions.

• Conduct script design reviews.

• Conduct execution reviews.

• Ensure offshore team meets quality, timelines, and reporting standards.

• Act as an escalation point for complex technical issues.

Qualifications

• 6-8+ years in performance testing/performance engineering.

• 3+ years in an architect-level or strategic leadership role.

• Proven experience designing performance strategy from early SDLC phases.

• Experience managing or coordinating offshore performance teams.

• Strong expertise in tools such as JMeter and LoadRunner.

• Deep understanding of APM tools, including AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and New Relic.

• Deep understanding of JVM/GC tuning.

• Deep understanding of thread pools and connection pooling.

• Deep understanding of database performance tuning basics.

• Deep understanding of microservices and distributed systems.

• Experience in cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.

• Familiarity with CI/CD integration for performance testing.

• Strong understanding of HTTP/S.

• Strong understanding of REST APIs.

• Strong understanding of Kafka or messaging systems.

• Strong understanding of Kubernetes container environments.

• Strong stakeholder management and requirement elicitation skills.

• Excellent documentation and presentation skills.

• Ability to translate business SLAs into technical performance metrics.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.

• Experience influencing architecture decisions.

• Experience in retail, e-commerce, or high-transaction systems.

• Experience designing performance strategy for large-scale distributed systems.

• Experience with chaos engineering concepts.

• Knowledge of SRE practices, including SLI/SLO/SLA alignment.

Why Join Williams-Sonoma India Technology Center

• Our people-first and performance-driven culture provides opportunities to grow, build a career, and invest in the well-being of our associates, including comprehensive benefits to support you and your family.

• Scale and innovation of a Fortune 500 company combined with high ownership that empowers engineers to make real impact.

• Build and operate large-scale digital commerce platforms serving millions of customers worldwide.

• Continuous learning environment with opportunities to work on cutting-edge technologies, AI-driven solutions, and large-scale engineering challenges.

• Hybrid work model designed for flexibility and collaboration, with two in-office days for team engagement.