Senior Director, Quality Engineering – Performance, Scalability & Reliability
Lead the global strategy for performance, scalability, and reliability engineering at Okta, ensuring peak efficiency and system resilience.
Posted by employer 1 day ago
First seen on Joblaze 51 minutes ago
Last verified on the company career page 51 minutes ago
Skills & Technologies
What you'll build
- Define and execute technology roadmap for performance engineering
- Oversee development of performance testing frameworks
- Evaluate system designs for performance bottlenecks
- Establish performance budgets and regression alerts
- Drive predictive capacity planning models
Must have
- 15+ years of experience in Software Engineering or Quality Engineering
- 8+ years in direct engineering management roles
- Deep technical expertise in cloud architectures
- Hands-on proficiency with performance testing tools
- Strong domain understanding of API performance
Nice to have
- Prior experience in Identity and Access Management
- Experience integrating Chaos Engineering practices
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science
AI in the day-to-day
Use AI to improve test coverage, simulate real-world use cases, and elevate the quality of testing processes and tools.
Requirements
- Experience
- 15+ years
- Education
- Bachelor's degree
Not disclosed in this posting: visa sponsorship.
Benefits
Joblaze summary
The Senior Director of Quality Engineering at Okta leads the strategy and execution of performance testing, scalability, and reliability across the company's product lines. This role requires deep expertise in cloud architectures, distributed systems, and performance testing tools, along with a strong background in managing high-performing engineering teams. Ideal candidates will have extensive experience in software or quality engineering, particularly within multi-tenant SaaS environments. The position emphasizes collaboration with various engineering and product teams to ensure optimal system performance and resilience.
Joblaze insights
- Listed today — first seen on Joblaze October 17, 2026. Last confirmed on Okta's careers page October 17, 2026.
- Salary band is above the typical range for Management roles (median ~$172,000).
- Starts above 96% of 278 comparable director management roles in United States we track (median $204,250 across 122 companies).
- AWS appears in 1.8% of 506 comparable director management roles in United States; NoSQL appears in 0.2% of 506 comparable director management roles in United States.
Quick facts
- Is the Senior Director, Quality Engineering – Performance, Scalability & Reliability role remote?
- It's hybrid — Okta expects some on-site time in San Francisco, California, United States.
- What's the salary range?
- Okta lists $312,000–$429,000 for this role.
- How much experience is required?
- At least 15 years of relevant experience for this Senior Director, Quality Engineering – Performance, Scalability & Reliability role.
- Where is the role based?
- Okta is hiring for this position in San Francisco, California, United States.
- What's the tech stack?
- Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: AWS, Datadog, Docker, GCP, Gatling, Grafana.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Okta targets director candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Senior Director, Quality Engineering – Performance, Scalability & Reliability role at Okta.
From the original posting
Secure Every Identity, from AI to Human
Senior Director, Quality Engineering – Performance, Scalability & Reliability
Location: San Francisco, CA | San Jose, CA
Team: Product & Engineering
Type: Full-Time
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
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.
P24948
#LI-HYBRID
Below is the annual base salary range for candidates located in California (excluding San Francisco Bay Area), Colorado, Illinois, New York and Washington. Your actual base salary will depend on factors such as your skills, qualifications, experience, and work location. In addition, Okta offers equity (where applicable), bonus, and benefits, including health, dental and vision insurance, 401(k), flexible spending account, and paid leave (including PTO and parental leave) in accordance with our applicable plans and policies. To learn more about our Total Rewards program please visit: https://rewards.okta.com/us.
The Okta Experience
Standard company text repeated across Okta's postings is omitted here.