Global Director of Performance & Reliability Engineering

Okta; United States; Remote; USD 312,000 - 429,000; Full time

Job summary

Okta is seeking a Senior Director of Quality Engineering – Performance, Scalability & Reliability in the San Francisco Bay Area. You will lead the global strategy and execution for end-to-end performance testing, capacity planning, and system reliability across Workforce Identity Cloud and Customer Identity Cloud (Auth0).

You’ll manage a team of engineers and work with Core Engineering, Product Management, Infrastructure, and SRE to ensure peak efficiency and five-nines availability.

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.
• 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...
• P24948

Responsibilities

• Executive Leadership & Strategy: Define and execute the long-term technology roadmap for Integration testing, performance engineering, stress testing, scalability modeling, and reliability validation across the company’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 the company
• 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 the company 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.

Skills

AWS

GCP

Kubernetes

Docker

SQL

NoSQL

Caching.

API performance

rate limiting

token validation

HTTP/2

gRPC

TLS

SAML

OAuth2

OIDC

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering or related field

Tools

JMeter

Locust

k6

Gatling

Datadog

Prometheus

Grafana

Splunk

New Relic

Job description

Okta is seeking a Senior Director of Quality Engineering – Performance, Scalability & Reliability in the San Francisco Bay Area. You will lead the global strategy and execution for end-to-end performance testing, capacity planning, and system reliability across Workforce Identity Cloud and Customer Identity Cloud (Auth0).

You’ll manage a team of engineers and work with Core Engineering, Product Management, Infrastructure, and SRE to ensure peak efficiency and five-nines availability.