Senior Director, Performance Engineering & Reliability

IFS; Staines-upon-Thames; On-site; GBP 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

IFS is seeking a Senior Director of Performance Engineering for its Product and Technology organization. This strategic leadership role establishes performance as a competitive advantage and core product differentiator across the entire product and infrastructure landscape.

You will define performance strategy, lead the transformation toward a performance-first culture, and build a team of performance engineers focused on optimization, cost efficiency and customer experience.

Qualifications

• Experience leading performance engineering teams and strategy.
• Strong knowledge of SLO/SLI, observability, and performance dashboards.
• Excellent collaboration with product, infra, security and data teams.

Responsibilities

• Define organization-wide performance vision, strategy and goals.
• Set performance standards and SLOs for latency, throughput, availability and cost across services and APIs.
• Define performance architecture patterns and guardrails to guide engineering decisions.
• Own performance roadmap and communicate progress to leadership.
• Embed performance requirements in product specs and architecture reviews from inception.
• Establish comprehensive performance measurement using synthetic and real user monitoring.
• Collaborate with Observability to instrument systems and gather latency, throughput and cost metrics.
• Create dashboards and reports for engineering, product leaders and executives.
• Conduct baselines, benchmarking and regression analysis to identify optimization opportunities.
• Translate data into architectural and investment decisions for optimization.
• Lead end-to-end performance across frontend, APIs, databases and infrastructure.
• Drive best practices in code optimization, caching, and cloud cost optimization.
• Partner with infra teams on capacity planning and cost-performance trade-offs.
• Address performance at scale and ensure linear scalability.
• Own performance strategy for agentic AI systems including latency and token processing.

Job description

IFS is seeking a Senior Director of Performance Engineering for its Product and Technology organization. This strategic leadership role establishes performance as a competitive advantage and core product differentiator across the entire product and infrastructure landscape.

You will define performance strategy, lead the transformation toward a performance-first culture, and build a team of performance engineers focused on optimization, cost efficiency and customer experience.