Senior Director, Quality Engineering – Performance, Scalability & Reliability

Okta•San Francisco, CA

16h•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Director of Performance, Scalability, and Reliability Engineering leads the global strategy, architecture, and execution of end-to-end performance testing, capacity planning, and system reliability across Okta product lines. The role leads engineers and managers focused on ensuring the Okta Identity Cloud operates efficiently, supports extreme throughput, and achieves five-nines (99.999%) availability. The position partners with Core Engineering, Product Management, Infrastructure, and Site Reliability Engineering to drive proactive performance testing, scalability, and resilience. It leads integration, performance, scalability, and reliability testing across Okta products and platforms, including Auth0, Workforce Identity, and agentic AI products, with the goal of delivering enterprise-grade performance and reliability for global customers.

Requirements

15+ years of progressive experience in Software Engineering, Quality Engineering, or Infrastructure.
8+ years in direct engineering management or leadership roles.
Track record leading performance engineering, scalability, or SRE organizations at a multi-tenant, hyperscale SaaS or cloud infrastructure company.
Deep technical expertise in cloud architectures such as AWS and GCP, distributed systems, microservices, containerization such as Kubernetes and Docker, and SQL, NoSQL, and caching architectures.
Hands-on proficiency with performance testing tools and frameworks such as JMeter, Locust, k6, Gatling, and distributed load generation.
Experience with APM and observability stacks such as Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or New Relic.
Strong understanding of API performance, rate limiting, token validation, HTTP/2, gRPC, TLS, and identity protocols such as SAML, OAuth2, and OIDC.
Track record managing multi-million-dollar cloud infrastructure efficiency initiatives and capacity-planning models.
Exceptional communication, negotiation, and cross-functional executive alignment skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience in Identity and Access Management (IAM), cybersecurity, or mission-critical enterprise SaaS.
Experience integrating Chaos Engineering practices, such as Gremlin or Chaos Mesh, into production and staging pipelines.
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.

Responsibilities

Define and execute the long-term technology roadmap for integration testing, performance engineering, stress testing, scalability modeling, and reliability validation across Workforce Identity Cloud and Customer Identity Cloud (Auth0).
Oversee enterprise-scale load, stress, endurance, and chaos testing frameworks that simulate millions of concurrent authentications and API requests.
Advise senior engineering leaders and principal architects on system designs, microservices, database topologies, and cloud infrastructure, identifying performance bottlenecks and failure modes.
Shift performance and reliability testing into CI/CD pipelines by establishing performance budgets, regression alerts, and automated baseline validation for releases.
Use AI to improve test coverage, simulate real-world use cases, and improve testing processes and tools.
Drive predictive capacity planning that aligns infrastructure provisioning and cloud spending with customer growth, traffic spikes, and high-volume identity events.
Partner with SRE and Incident Management to analyze outages and performance degradations, lead root-cause analysis, and turn lessons into automated performance test suites.
Use AI to analyze problems and improve methods for rate-limiting Okta APIs and supporting customer events such as conferences.
Lead, grow, and empower performance engineers, tool developers, and engineering managers, fostering an inclusive, high-performance engineering culture.
Lead integration and performance testing across Okta products and platforms, including Auth0 and the Okta Workforce Identity suite.
Lead scalability and reliability testing for Okta’s agentic AI products.