Director of Performance & Reliability Engineering | Okta

The Briefed; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 380,000; Full time

Job summary

Okta is seeking a Senior Director of Performance, Scalability, and Reliability Engineering to lead global strategy and execution of performance testing, capacity planning, and reliability across Okta product lines. You will guide a team of engineers and collaborate with Core Engineering, Product, Infrastructure, and SRE to ensure peak efficiency and five-nines availability.

You will drive proactive testing across Auth0, Okta Workforce Identity, and related platforms, including AI-enabled testing

Qualifications

• 15+ years in software/QE or infra, with 8+ years in engineering management.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute long-term tech roadmap for testing and reliability.

Skills

Executive leadership

Performance engineering

Cloud architectures

Kubernetes

Docker

Observability

API performance

Chaos testing

Cross-functional leadership

AI in testing

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/Engineering

Tools

JMeter

Locust

k6

Gatling

Datadog

Prometheus

Grafana

Splunk

New Relic

Job description

As the Senior Director of Performance, Scalability, and Reliability Engineering, you will be responsible for leading the global strategy, architecture, and execution of end-to-end performance testing, capacity planning, and system reliability across all Okta product lines.

In this high-impact executive role, you will lead a team of high-performing engineers and managers dedicated to ensuring the Okta Identity Cloud operates at peak efficiency, extreme throughput, and five-nines (99.999%) availability. You will partner closely with Core Engineering, Product Management, Infrastructure, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to drive proactive performance testing, push the limits of system scalability, and build guardrails that keep Okta resilient against massive enterprise loads. You will lead a team to conduct Integration testing and Perf testing across Okta Products and Platforms for Auth0 and Okta Workforce Identity suite of Products.

You will also lead scalability and reliability testing for Okta’s agentic AI products to ensure we can scale at Enterprise grade performance and deliver the same reliability as we do for SSO for global customers

About Okta

Okta is the World’s Identity Company. We free everyone to safely use any technology—anywhere, on any device or app. Our Workforce and Customer Identity Clouds enable companies to protect the identities of their applicants, employees, and customers, while providing seamless access from any device, anywhere.

Thousands of customers, including Adobe, JetBlue, and Farmers Insurance, trust Okta to help them work faster, boost efficiency, and stay secure. Okta’s top priority is to provide a reliable, scalable, and secure platform. We are building a world where anyone can safely use any technology, and we need exceptional leaders to help us achieve this vision.

What You’ll Do

Executive Leadership & Strategy: Define and execute the long-term technology roadmap for Integration testing, performance engineering, stress testing, scalability modeling, and reliability validation across Okta’s Workforce Identity Cloud and Customer Identity Cloud (Auth0).

Massive-Scale Performance & Chaos Testing: Oversee the development and maintenance of enterprise-scale load, stress, endurance, and chaos testing frameworks capable of simulating millions of peak concurrent authentications and API requests.

Architecture & Scalability Guidance: Serve as a trusted advisor to senior engineering leaders and principal architects, evaluating system designs, microservices, database topologies, and cloud infrastructure for performance bottlenecks and failure modes.

Proactive Reliability & Guardrails: Shift performance and reliability testing left into the CI/CD pipeline, establishing performance budgets, regression alerts, and automated baseline validation for every release. Use AI to improve test coverage, simulate real-world use cases and elevate the quality of Testing process and tools with in Okta

Capacity Planning & Cost Efficiency: Drive predictive capacity planning models that align infrastructure provisioning and cloud spend with customer growth, traffic spikes, and high-volume identity events (e.g., Cyber Monday, election cycles, mega-enterprise rollouts).

Incident Post-Mortems & Resilience: Partner with SRE and Incident Management to analyze critical system outages and performance degradations, driving root-cause analysis (RCA) and translating lessons learned into automated performance test suites. Use AI to conduct analysis and identify problems and set up improved methods for Rate limiting Okta APIs and supporting Customer events such as Conferences etc.

Team Building & Talent Mentorship: Lead, grow, and empower a world-class organization of performance engineers, tool developers, and engineering managers. Foster an inclusive, high-performance engineering culture.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

15+ years of progressive experience in Software Engineering, Quality Engineering, or Infrastructure, with 8+ years in direct engineering management/leadership roles.

Track record leading high-performing performance engineering, scalability, or SRE organizations at a multi-tenant, hyper-scale SaaS or Cloud infrastructure company.

Deep technical expertise in cloud architectures (AWS, GCP), distributed systems, microservices, containerization (Kubernetes, Docker), and databases (SQL, NoSQL, Caching architectures).

Hands-on proficiency with performance testing tools and frameworks (e.g., JMeter, Locust, k6, Gatling, Distributed Load Generation) and APM/Observability stacks (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, New Relic).

Strong domain understanding of API performance, rate limiting, token validation, network protocols (HTTP/2, gRPC, TLS), and identity protocols (SAML, OAuth2, OIDC).

Proven track record of managing multi-million dollar cloud infrastructure efficiency initiatives and capacity planning models.

Exceptional communication, negotiation, and cross-functional executive alignment skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

Prior experience in the Identity and Access Management (IAM), Cyber Security, or mission-critical enterprise SaaS domain.

Experience integrating Chaos Engineering practices (e.g., Gremlin, Chaos Mesh) into production and staging pipelines.

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.