Lead Engineer, Performance Engineering

Job ID: 278397
Store Name/Number: FSC REMOTE SF/NY/DC -173(USA_0173)
Address: FSC, Remote, CA 94105, United States (US)
Hourly/Salaried: Salaried (Exempt)
Job Type: Full Time
Position Type: Regular

Job Function: Information Technology
 

Company Overview:

At Sephora we inspire our customers, empower our teams, and help them become the best versions of themselves.  We create an environment where people are valued, and differences are celebrated. Every day, our teams across the world bring to life our purpose: to expand the way the world sees beauty by empowering the Extra Ordinary in each of us.  We are united by a common goal - to reimagine the future of beauty.

Technology

At Sephora, our technology team works fast and smart. With San Francisco as our home, we take bringing new tech to market seriously, developing the latest in mobile technologies, scalable architecture, and the coolest in-store client experience. We love what we do, and we have fun doing it. The Technology group is comprised of motivated self-starters and true team players that are integral to the growth of Sephora and our future success. Our Performance Engineering team ensures fast, reliable, and scalable digital experiences across mobile apps and web platforms. Operating at the intersection of software engineering, infrastructure, and observability, we focus on detecting and eliminating performance bottlenecks, optimizing efficiency, and enhancing end-user experience. From load and resiliency testing to capacity planning and real-user monitoring, we leverage automation, analytics, and modern cloud technologies to build resilient, future-ready systems. If you’re passionate about performance, scalability, and innovation, you'll find a great fit within our team.

Your role at Sephora...

At Sephora, as the Lead Performance Engineer, you will own the end-to-end performance strategy for Sephora’s digital platforms ensuring speed, scalability, and reliability across e-commerce, APIs, and cloud-native systems. You’ll define benchmarks and KPIs, build automation frameworks, execute large-scale load and resiliency tests, and drive continuous optimization. This role requires close collaboration with Development, SRE, DevOps, Cloud, and Architecture teams to embed performance and resilience into every layer of our technology stack. If you’re passionate about solving complex scalability challenges and building systems that perform flawlessly under any condition, this is the role for you.

Responsibilties:

• Lead the performance engineering practice for Sephora’s digital systems (e.g., e-commerce platform, microservices, APIs), ensuring high-performance, high-availability, and scalable architecture.
• Design and execute performance testing strategies: load testing, stress testing, spike testing, soak testing, capacity planning, bottleneck analysis.
• Integrate Chaos Engineering practices to validate system resilience under failure conditions; leverage Gremlin, Chaos Mesh, or similar tools to simulate real-world failure scenarios and ensure systems can self-recover and degrade gracefully.
• Build and maintain monitoring, logging and alerting frameworks for performance-related metrics (both real-time and post-mortem analysis) using tools/platforms such as Splunk, AppDynamics, Dynatrace.
• Collaborate on continuous-delivery pipelines (CI/CD) to embed performance checks, automated regression testing, and performance gating.
• Drive root-cause analysis after performance incidents or degradations, propose remediations and ensure preventive engineering.

We're excited about you if you have:

• 8+ years significant hands-on responsibility for performance, scalability, and architecture of large, high-traffic systems (e-commerce or equivalent)
• 8+ years expertise in ensuring and overseeing stability, reliability, and performance of mission-critical software applications in production environments.
• 8+ years experience with monitoring, observability, and performance management tools such as Splunk, Dynatrace, Datadog, AppDynamics, or equivalent enterprise platforms.
• 8+ years proven track record in performance engineering, log analysis, anomaly detection, and troubleshooting of distributed systems.
• 2+ years prior experience in a retail, e-commerce or analogous high-scale environment preferred.
• Performance Testing & Monitoring: Expertise in JMeter, BlazeMeter, LoadRunner, Gatling, and APM tools like Dynatrace, AppDynamics, or New Relic.
• Technical & Cloud Expertise: Strong programming/scripting (Java, Python, Groovy), experience with microservices, APIs, Docker/Kubernetes, and cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Analytical & Problem-Solving: Ability to identify bottlenecks, optimize system
• Leadership & Collaboration: Lead teams, mentor engineers, and work closely with DevOps, SRE

The annual base salary range for this position is $173,610.00 - $192,900.00 The actual base salary offered depends on a variety of factors, which may include, as applicable, the applicant’s qualifications for the position; years of relevant experience; specific and unique skills; level of education attained; certifications or other professional licenses held; other legitimate, non-discriminatory business factors specific to the position; and the geographic location in which the applicant lives and/or from which they will perform the job.  Individuals employed in this position may also be eligible to earn bonuses.  Sephora offers a generous benefits package to full-time employees, which includes comprehensive health, dental and vision plans; a superior 401(k) plan, various paid time off programs; employee discount/perks; life insurance; disability insurance; flexible spending accounts; and an employee referral bonus program.

While at Sephora, you’ll enjoy…  

• The people. You will be surrounded by some of the most talented leaders and teams – people you can be proud to work with.  
• The learning. We invest in training and developing our teams, and you will continue evolving and building your skills through personalized career plans.
• The culture. As a leading beauty retailer within the LVMH family, our reach is broad, and our impact is global. It is in our DNA to innovate and, at Sephora, all 40,000 passionate team members across 35 markets and 3,000+ stores, are united by a common goal - to reimagine the future of beauty.

You can unleash your creativity, because we’ve got disruptive spirit. You can learn and evolve, because we empower you to be your best. You can be yourself, because you are what sets us apart. This, is the future of beauty. Reimagine your future, at Sephora. 

Sephora is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, military/veteran status, or disability status. Sephora is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to applicants with physical and mental disabilities.

Sephora will consider for employment all qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law.

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