Senior Manager Software Engineering

Career Area:

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.

Senior Engineering Manager – Performance Engineering & System Test Architecture

Role Overview:
The Senior Engineering Manager will lead the Performance Engineering and System Test Architecture function, ensuring scalability, reliability, and resilience of digital platforms and applications. This role will define test architecture strategies, build reusable frameworks, and drive performance and security testing initiatives across the enterprise.

Leads Performance Engineering, System Test Architecture, and Security testing integration, creating the reusable test architecture backbone and non-functional excellence for the organization.

Establish a platform-grade test architecture and a performance-first culture that ensures reliability, scalability, and resilience of digital systems. Build reusable frameworks, simulators, and data pipelines that standardize how testing is done across teams. Operationalize AI-driven performance analytics and continuous reliability practices so the CoE becomes the de facto global authority for non-functional quality.

Key Responsibilities:

• Performance & Security Strategy:
  • Define and implement performance engineering roadmap for platforms and applications.
  • Oversee security testing practices and ensure compliance with enterprise standards.
  • Establish continuous performance: shift-left perf checks (k6/JMeter in CI), component-level budgets, and release-level load tests.
  • Create production-informed workloads using real user data patterns (privacy-safe) and seasonal event profiles.
  • Lead capacity planning, scalability modelling, and resilience drills (chaos testing, failover, throttling) with SRE and Platform teams.
  • Partner with Security for threat modelling and abuse-case testing; ensure privacy-by-design in test data.
• System Test Architecture:
  • Design and maintain common test frameworks for digital QA.
  • Drive innovation in test architecture, including simulators and automation accelerators.
  • Define the reference test architecture—patterns, blueprints, and reference implementations (web, mobile, API, data, event-driven, microservices).
  • Build shared accelerators: test harnesses, stubs/mocks, service virtualization, data factories, golden test suites, and simulators/digital twins.
  • Own environment strategy (capacity, parity, test data, observability) across SIT, Performance, and Pre-Prod.
• Scalability & Optimization:
  • Conduct performance benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
  • Collaborate with development and infrastructure teams to optimize system performance.
  • Deploy AI-driven telemetry: correlate logs, traces, and metrics to isolate performance regressions and predict saturation points.
  • Use LLMs for bottleneck triage summaries, perf-test script generation, and root-cause hypotheses.
  • Stand up AIOps integrations so incidents and perf anomalies loop back into risk-based testing and SLO guardrails.
• Governance & Reporting:
  • Establish metrics for performance, scalability, and security readiness.
  • Provide insights and recommendations to leadership for continuous improvement.
• Team Leadership:
  • Build and mentor a high-performing team of performance engineers and test architects.
  • Promote best practices and knowledge sharing across QE organization.
  • Create the Non-Functional Excellence Guild—community of architects/engineers across domains for standards and best practices.
  • Run the QE Architecture Review Board to approve frameworks, tools, and patterns before broad rollout.
  • Coach architects and engineers; launch learning paths in performance, reliability, security, and AI-in-testing.

Required Skills & Experience:

• 16 to 20+ years in software testing and performance engineering, with 4+ years in leadership roles.
• Deep expertise in performance testing tools (e.g., JMeter, LoadRunner) and security testing.
• Strong understanding of system architecture, cloud platforms, and distributed systems.
• Experience in designing reusable test frameworks and simulators.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills.
• Performance: k6, JMeter, Gatling, Locust; LoadRunner (as applicable).
• Profiling/Tracing: AWS CloudWatch, APPD, Lighthouse, Site-Speed etc
• Observability & AIOps: Grafana/Prometheus, Datadog/New Relic, anomaly detection.
• Security: SAST/DAST/IAST/SCA toolchains; secrets/container scanning.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Knowledge of accessibility and compliance standards.
• Experience in large-scale enterprise systems and digital transformation programs.

Posting Dates:

Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply

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