Senior Engineering Manager Performance Engineering - QA

Career Area

Technology, Digital and Data

Job Description

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

Role Overview

The Senior Engineering Manager will lead Non-Functional Quality Engineering (NFR) across digital platforms, with primary accountability for Performance Engineering, scalability, reliability, and resilience.

This is a horizontal enterprise leadership role responsible for ensuring that performance and reliability are designed into systems, validated early, and sustained in production at scale.

The role partners closely with Architecture, Engineering, SRE, and QE delivery leaders to establish a performance-first engineering culture, drive NFR governance, and enable data-driven release and architecture decisions.

Over time, this role is expected to expand into broader Quality Engineering leadership, contributing to enterprise-wide quality strategy.

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise Non-Functional Quality Leadership

• Own and define the Non-Functional Quality (NFR) strategy and operating model
• Establish governance for performance, scalability, reliability, and resilience
• Define NFR intake, validation, and release readiness criteria
• Drive performance-first engineering culture
  
  

• Own enterprise-wide performance engineering capability
• Define lifecycle: workload modeling, test strategy, certification, production validation
• Establish shift-left performance in CI/CD
• Define performance budgets and certification models
• Drive production-informed workload models
  
  

• Influence system design using performance-first principles
• Define QE architecture patterns and reusable frameworks
• Drive standardization across automation, virtualization, and test data
• Own environment and observability alignment
  
  

• Align with SRE on SLOs/SLIs
• Drive resilience engineering practices
• Link production telemetry to performance validation
  
  

• Define performance and NFR metrics
• Present risks in executive forums
• Translate technical risks into business impact
  
  

• Drive AI-assisted testing and analytics
• Enable anomaly detection and automated RCA
  
  

• Build and scale Non-Functional QE capability
• Mentor engineers and architects
• Establish Non-Functional Excellence Guild
  
  

• 20+ years in QE / Performance Engineering
• 8+ years leading large, distributed teams
  
  

• Proven enterprise performance leadership
• Cross-functional influence (Architecture, SRE, Product)
• Strong executive communication skills
  
  

• Distributed systems, microservices, APIs
• Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure)
• Observability and APM ecosystems
  
  

• Experience with large-scale digital platforms
• Exposure to AI/ML-driven testing
  
  

• Performance risks identified before production
• Reduction in production performance issues
• Predictable performance certification
• Strong executive confidence in releases
• Scalable NFR capability established