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Salary: USD 312,000 - 429,000 / annual
Okta is seeking a Senior Director of Quality Engineering to lead the global strategy, architecture, and execution of end-to-end performance testing, capacity planning, and system reliability across all Okta product lines. This is a high-impact executive role leading 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. Key responsibilities include:
**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 and elevate the quality of testing processes and tools.
**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.
**Incident Post-Mortems & Resilience**: Partner with SRE and Incident Management to analyze critical system outages, driving root-cause analysis and translating lessons learned into automated performance test suites.
**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.
Okta secures identity infrastructure for thousands of enterprise customers including Adobe, JetBlue, and Farmers Insurance. The role involves leading scalability and reliability testing for Okta's agentic AI products to ensure enterprise-grade performance and reliability.
**Requirements**
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
