Senior Director, Quality Engineering – Performance, Scalability & Reliability

Secure Every Identity, from AI to HumanIdentity is the key to unlocking the potential of AI. Okta secures AI by building the trusted, neutral infrastructure that enables organizations to safely embrace this new era. This work requires a relentless drive to solve complex challenges with real-world stakes. We are looking for builders and owners who operate with speed and urgency and execute with excellence.This is an opportunity to do career-defining work. We're all in on this mission. If you are too, let's talk.

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.

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The annual base salary range for this position for candidates located in the San Francisco Bay area is between:

$312,000—$429,000 USD

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 annual base salary range for this position for candidates located in California (excluding San Francisco Bay Area), Colorado, Illinois, New York, and Washington is between:

$278,000—$383,000 USD

The Okta Experience

• Supporting Your Well-Being

• Driving Social Impact

• Developing Talent and Fostering Connection + Community

We are intentional about connection. Our global community, spanning over 20 offices worldwide, is united by a drive to innovate. Your journey begins with an immersive, in-person onboarding experience designed to accelerate your impact and connect you to our mission and team from day one.Okta is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, or status as a protected veteran. We also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and convictions records, consistent with applicable laws.If reasonable accommodation is needed to complete any part of the job application, interview process, or onboarding please use this Form to request an accommodation.Notice for New York City Applicants & Employees: Okta may use Automated Employment Decision Tools (AEDT), as defined by New York City Local Law 144, that use artificial intelligence, machine learning, or other automated processes to assist in our recruitment and hiring process. In accordance with NYC Local Law 144, if you are an applicant or employee residing in New York City, please click here to view our full NYC AEDT Notice.