Senior Director, Quality Engineering – Performance, Scalability & Reliability
San Francisco · 8+ years experience · Hybrid · Posted Oct 16, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 8+ years experience
- Workplace
- Hybrid
- Location
- San Francisco
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.
- Position Overview
- 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 the role
- The Senior Director of Performance, Scalability, and Reliability Engineering leads the global strategy, architecture, and execution of performance testing, capacity planning, and system reliability for Okta's product lines.
- This executive role involves managing a team of engineers and managers to ensure the Okta Identity Cloud maintains peak efficiency, extreme throughput, and 99.999% availability.
- The position focuses on scaling both the Workforce Identity Cloud and Auth0, including reliability testing for agentic AI products.
Responsibilities
- Define and execute the long-term technology roadmap for integration testing, performance engineering, stress testing, scalability modeling, and reliability validation.
- Oversee the development and maintenance of enterprise-scale load, stress, endurance, and chaos testing frameworks.
- Serve as a trusted advisor to senior engineering leaders and principal architects regarding system designs, microservices, and cloud infrastructure.
- Shift performance and reliability testing left into the CI/CD pipeline by establishing performance budgets and automated baseline validation.
- Drive predictive capacity planning models to align infrastructure provisioning with customer growth and traffic spikes.
- Analyze critical system outages and performance degradations to drive root-cause analysis and automated test suite improvements.
- Use AI to improve test coverage, simulate real-world use cases, and identify problems for API rate limiting.
- Lead, grow, and empower a global organization of performance engineers, tool developers, and engineering managers.
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 (AWS, GCP), distributed systems, microservices, containerization (Kubernetes, Docker), and databases (SQL, NoSQL, Caching).
- Hands-on proficiency with performance testing tools (e.g., JMeter, Locust, k6, Gatling) 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.
Benefits
- Health insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- 401(k)
- Flexible spending account
- Paid leave (PTO and parental leave)
- Equity
- Bonus
Workplace
- Hybrid work model
Skills
- AWS
- GCP
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- SQL
- NoSQL
- JMeter
- Locust
- K6
- Gatling
- Datadog
- Prometheus
Show all 15 skills
- Grafana
- Splunk
- New Relic
