Job Description Manager, QA Engineering

Disney Parks, Experiences and Products is a world-class entertainment and technology leader. Walt's passion was to innovate and to push boundaries of what is possible, a passion that remains central in our business to this day. Uniting each endeavor is a commitment to creating and delivering unforgettable experiences, and we're constantly looking for new ways to enhance these exciting experiences for our guests.

Our Mission statement

- Reduce/Eliminate Guest Impacting Incidents/Outages across the Guest Experience

- Allow the product teams to focus on development and enhancement of our Products Portfolio

The Role

The Performance Engineering team within Disney Experiences is hiring a Manager, QA Engineering to lead a team of 410 performance engineers responsible for quality assurance across high-traffic, guest- and cast-facing systems web, mobile, dedicated appliances, and the back-end services behind them. This role owns team deliverables and system-level quality across complex testing environments, supporting integration across platforms and driving advanced performance analysis.

You will manage the team's workload and deliverables, set quarterly OKRs and drive the team to meet them, oversee test planning and architectural reviews, and ensure the team troubleshoots performance issues, recommends scaling parameters, and delivers scripting and execution to standard. You will partner closely with development, product, and project management to set expectations, size effort, and deliver against go-live dates, and report team progress and risks to senior leadership on a weekly cadence.

We're looking for a technical people-manager who is proactive and self-directed, communicates clearly under pressure, develops the engineers on their team, and raises the bar for the organization around them.

Responsibilities

- Manage a team of 410 QA performance engineers hiring, onboarding, coaching, performance management, and career development.

- Own team deliverables end-to-end, from intake and prioritization through execution, sign-off, and post-mortem.

- Define and drive quarterly OKRs aligned to the Performance Engineering organization's goals; track progress and course-correct as needed to meet commitments.

- Track team workload, capacity, and throughput in JIRA maintain a healthy backlog, manage sprint or kanban cadence, and keep tickets current.

- Generate reporting on team health, project status, test coverage, defect trends, and OKR progress for engineering leadership.

- Submit a weekly status report covering accomplishments, in-flight work, risks, blockers, and the week ahead.

- Apply engineering principles to quality assurance support complex system testing and quality integration across platforms, from upstream services through caches, queues, and databases.

- Stand up new performance testing projects in partnership with business stakeholders prioritize the work, build the plan, and deliver against go-live dates.

- Break large projects down into executable tasks and sequence them against project objectives.

- Drive advanced testing approaches in state-of-the-art QA environments, including complex and system-level testing scenarios.

- Manage capacity and scaling of cloud services to meet demand during launches and peak events.

- Communicate project status clearly to project managers, directors, and senior leadership.

- Mentor and develop performance engineers on task breakdown, execution discipline, technical depth, and on-time delivery.

- Remove blockers for the team and escalate cleanly when you can't.

- Share your team's work, learnings, and wins with the broader organization.

Basic Qualifications

Communication & Leadership:

- Excellent written and verbal communication; able to translate advanced technical topics for both technical and non-technical audiences.

- Composed under pressure can represent the organization in cross-functional incidents and speak credibly to all levels of stakeholders.

- Proven experience managing a team of performance or QA engineers including hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development and leading them through scripting, execution, prioritization, and root-cause analysis.

- Track record of setting and delivering against quarterly OKRs, managing team capacity in JIRA, and reporting status to senior leadership.

- Strong analytical and problem-solving instincts; able to collect and articulate forensic detail that drives root cause.

- Self-starter who runs planning efforts, architectural reviews, and team meetings without being asked.

Technical Skills:

- Expert: Performance engineering fundamentals, JMeter, code profiling, APM tools, test data management.

- Experienced: Chaos testing, agile project management, cloud infrastructure.

- Intermediate: Java fundamentals, database fundamentals, caching technologies.

- Working knowledge: Docker / containerization, serverless / Lambda.

- Technical depth to code automated test software where it accelerates the work coding is a tool of the role, not the defining boundary.

- Experience performance testing complex service architectures, including upstream services, caches, and databases.

- SRE mindset operate production-grade cloud systems with the same rigor as the services under test:

1. Infrastructure as Code with Terraform to provision and manage test environments and supporting cloud infrastructure.

2. AI-assisted observability using AIOps / anomaly detection in tools like Dynatrace Davis, New Relic AI, Splunk ITSI, or Datadog Watchdog to surface performance regressions and triage incidents faster.

3. Service Level Objectives (SLOs), SLIs, and error budgets defining, measuring, and using them to gate releases and prioritize reliability work.

4. Chaos testing and fault injection designing and running game days with AWS Fault Injection Simulator, Gremlin, or equivalents to validate resilience.

Required Technical Experience:

- Performance testing and analysis of large-scale, consumer- and employee-facing enterprise cloud systems.

- Proficiency with load testing tools JMeter (required), plus LoadRunner, BlazeMeter, or equivalents.

- Deep-dive troubleshooting of application performance issues across cloud services, databases, and dependent systems, with the ability to recommend scaling parameters for production environments.

- Testing web, caching, and queuing technologies in high-traffic environments.

- Designing and running tests against highly scalable, highly available systems.

- Hands-on experience with at least one major public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

- Chaos testing and fault injection in production-like environments using AWS Fault Injection Simulator, Gremlin, or equivalents.

- Infrastructure as Code with Terraform for provisioning and managing cloud test environments.

- Defining and operating against SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets to drive reliability decisions.

- AI-assisted observability and AIOps for anomaly detection, alerting, and incident triage.

- Working knowledge of containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).

Preferred Technical Qualifications:

- Languages & Scripting: Java, Flutter, Angular; JMeter scripting in Groovy.

- Performance Engineering Tools: JMeter (primary load testing platform).

- Logging / Monitoring / Profiling: CloudWatch, Splunk, AppDynamics, Grafana, New Relic, Dynatrace, Wily, JConsole, GC Analyzer.

- Chaos Testing: AWS Fault Injection Simulator, Gremlin.

- Cloud AWS: Fargate, ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, EC2, S3, ALB/ELB, ElastiCache, VPC, IAM, EKS.

- Cloud GCP: App Engine, Kubernetes (Helm), Cloud Functions, Firebase, IAM.

- Cloud Other: Azure, Salesforce Platform.

- Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes.

- Caching: Redis, ElastiCache.

- Message Queueing: RabbitMQ.

- Databases: MariaDB, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, AWS Aurora.

Required Education & Experience:

Bachelor's degree, or 10+ years of equivalent experience in performance engineering at enterprise scale, with 2+ years of direct people-management experience.