Senior Director, Quality Engineering – Performance, Scalability & Reliability

Okta • San Francisco, CA

1d • $278,000 - $429,000 • 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 responsible for ensuring the Okta Identity Cloud achieves high efficiency, throughput, and five-nines (99.999%) availability. It partners with Core Engineering, Product Management, Infrastructure, and SRE to drive proactive testing, scalability, and resilience across Okta Workforce Identity, Customer Identity Cloud (Auth0), and agentic AI products.

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, hyper-scale SaaS or cloud infrastructure company.
• Deep technical expertise in cloud architectures such as AWS and GCP, distributed systems, microservices, Kubernetes, 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 tools 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 including 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), Cyber Security, 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 roadmap for integration testing, performance engineering, stress testing, scalability modeling, and reliability validation across Okta’s 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, including performance bottlenecks and failure modes.
• Move performance and reliability testing into CI/CD pipelines and establish 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 spend with customer growth, traffic spikes, and high-volume identity events.
• Partner with SRE and Incident Management to analyze outages and performance degradation, lead root-cause analysis, and turn lessons learned into automated performance test suites.
• Use AI to analyze incidents and identify problems, and improve methods for rate limiting Okta APIs and supporting customer events.
• Lead, grow, and empower performance engineers, tool developers, and engineering managers while fostering an inclusive, high-performance culture.
• Lead integration and performance testing across Okta products and platforms, including Auth0 and Okta Workforce Identity products.
• Lead scalability and reliability testing for Okta’s agentic AI products.

Benefits

• Equity, where applicable.
• Bonus.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k).
• Flexible spending account.
• Paid leave, including PTO and parental leave, in accordance with applicable plans and policies.
• In-person onboarding experience.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed