Senior Director, Performance Engineering -Infrastructure and Reliability

Job description

We are hiring a Senior Director of Performance Engineering for our Product and Technology organization — a strategic leadership role accountable for establishing performance as a competitive advantage and core product differentiator. You will define performance strategy across the entire product stack, lead the transformation toward a performance-first culture, and build a team of performance engineers who drive continuous optimization, cost efficiency and customer experience. You will partner closely with product, engineering, infrastructure, security and observability teams to embed performance excellence into how we build, ship and operate software. Role overview As Senior Director of Performance Engineering, you own the performance strategy, standards and excellence across the entire product and infrastructure landscape. You are accountable for ensuring that all customer-facing systems, APIs, infrastructure, databases, and the delivery pipeline perform at levels that meet customer expectations, enable rapid iteration, and drive cost efficiency. This spans frontend performance, API latency, backend throughput, database query optimization, container orchestration efficiency, CDN strategy, agentic AI inference performance, and real user monitoring across all product lines. This is a strategic leadership role that combines technical authority with broad organizational influence. You will set performance standards, establish measurement frameworks, drive performance improvements across teams, advocate for performance investment, and champion a culture where performance is considered in every architecture decision. You work closely with engineering teams, product leaders, infrastructure/cloud operations, security, observability, and the customer success organization to ensure performance translates directly to customer value and competitive advantage. Your mandate is to transform performance engineering from a reactive, post-hoc optimization effort into a proactive, embedded capability that is designed into products from inception. Performance is not a feature you add later — it is a fundamental quality attribute that shapes architecture, influences release velocity, reduces operational costs, improves customer experience and enables product innovation. You will lead this cultural transformation while building a high-performing team and delivering measurable business impact. Duties and accountabilities Performance strategy and standards • Define organization-wide performance vision, strategy and goals aligned with product strategy, customer expectations and competitive positioning. • Establish performance standards and SLOs (Service Level Objectives) for latency, throughput, availability and cost across all services, APIs and customer-facing systems. • Define performance architecture patterns, design principles and guardrails that make performant choices the easy choices for engineering teams. • Own performance roadmap: prioritize performance initiatives, set timelines, and communicate progress to leadership and stakeholders. • Ensure performance requirements are embedded in product specifications and architecture reviews from inception, not bolted on later. Performance measurement and intelligence • Establish comprehensive performance measurement frameworks, including synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring (RUM), and observability-driven performance insights. • Partner with the Observability team to instrument systems for performance visibility, including detailed metrics on latency percentiles, throughput, resource utilization and cost attribution. • Define performance dashboards and reporting that make performance status visible to engineering teams, product leaders and executives. • Conduct performance baselines, benchmarking and regression analysis; identify performance issues, root causes and optimization opportunities. • Translate performance data into actionable insights that guide architecture decisions, infrastructure investments and optimization priorities. Cross-stack performance optimization • Own end-to-end performance from frontend through APIs, backends, databases, caching layers, message queues and infrastructure. • Lead performance optimization initiatives across the stack: code optimization, algorithmic improvements, database query tuning, caching strategies, CDN configuration, container efficiency, cloud cost optimization. • Drive adoption of performance best practices: query optimization, async processing, event-driven architectures, edge caching, resource pooling, connection management. • Partner with infrastructure and cloud operations teams on capacity planning, resource optimization, cost attribution and cost-performance trade-offs. • Address performance at scale: benchmark under realistic load; identify bottlenecks under peak traffic; ensure systems scale linearly with demand. Agentic AI and emerging system performance • Own performance strategy for agentic AI systems: inference latency, throughput, cost per inference, token-per-second processing, multi-agent orchestration efficiency. • Establish performance guardrails for agent systems: maximum acceptable latency for customer-facing agents, cost budgets, resource constraints, concurrent request limits. • Partner with AI/ML and product teams to optimize agent performance: prompt optimization, caching strategies, batching, token efficiency, model selection for latency trade-offs. • Measure and optimize end-to-end latency for agent workflows, including LLM inference, orchestration, tool invocation, and response generation. Performance culture and team leadership • Build and lead the Performance Engineering team, including specialists in frontend performance, backend optimization, database tuning, infrastructure efficiency and observability integration. • Drive a performance-first culture across Product and Technology: make performance visible, celebrate improvements, hold teams accountable for performance impact of changes. • Mentor engineers and engineering leaders on performance thinking; embed performance expertise into product teams and platform teams. • Actively review high-impact designs and pull requests from a performance lens; provide technical guidance on performance trade-offs. • Communicate performance strategy, wins and progress to engineering leadership, product leadership and board/executive stakeholders. What success looks like • Performance is embedded in how engineering teams design systems from the start; performance is not an afterthought or later optimization phase. • Performance metrics are visible to all teams; teams proactively monitor and improve performance rather than waiting for performance issues to surface. • Product latency, throughput and cost are measurably better year-over-year; customer experience is visibly improved due to performance gains. • Agentic AI systems deliver sub-second to few-second latency for customer-facing agents; cost per inference is optimized and competitive. • Engineering teams view performance engineers as trusted partners and performance experts they consult on architecture decisions. • Customer satisfaction improves due to faster product, faster feature delivery (shorter build/test/release cycles due to optimized systems), and lower service costs translating to competitive pricing. • Performance is a competitive differentiator; customers and prospects recognize the product as fast and efficient. Required skills and experience • Proven software engineering experience with 5+ years focused on performance engineering, scalability, or systems optimization. • Deep hands-on expertise across the performance stack: frontend performance optimization, API design and efficiency, backend systems optimization, database query tuning, caching strategies. • Proven track record leading cross-functional performance initiatives at scale; demonstrable impact on product performance, customer experience or operational cost. • Strong expertise in observability, monitoring and measurement; ability to instrument systems for performance visibility and derive actionable insights from performance data. • Experience optimizing cloud and infrastructure costs; understanding of container orchestration, database optimization, and resource efficiency. • Experience designing and optimizing systems for scale; understanding of load testing, capacity planning, and systems behavior under peak demand. • Experience with performance tooling: profilers, load testing tools, APM (Application Performance Monitoring), observability platforms, cost management tools. • Strong leadership and communication skills; ability to influence engineering teams and executives on performance investment without formal authority. • Familiarity with emerging performance challenges: AI/ML inference optimization, generative AI latency and cost trade-offs, agentic system performance. Scope and expectations • Strategic leadership role accountable for performance excellence across the entire product stack and infrastructure. • Coverage spans frontend, APIs, backends, databases, caching, messaging, cloud infrastructure, observability integration, and agentic AI systems — end-to-end performance ownership. • Expected to set standards, influence architecture decisions and drive performance investments across engineering organization with authority but without formal control over all teams. • People-management role with responsibility for building and developing the Performance Engineering team (4-6+ people) across domain specialties. • Directly accountable for measurable improvements in product performance, customer experience and operational efficiency; performance impact is quantified and reported to leadership. Nice to have • Experience in a high-scale SaaS, cloud platform, or enterprise software company with significant performance and cost optimization challenges. • Demonstrated track record of cost optimization initiatives; experience reducing infrastructure spend by 20%+ while maintaining or improving performance. • Deep expertise in specific performance domains: edge computing, database optimization, distributed systems optimization, microservices performance. • Experience optimizing AI/ML inference pipelines, LLM serving, or agentic system performance at scale. • Experience working in fast-growing organizations where product velocity and operational efficiency are critical competitive advantages. • Published content or conference talks on performance engineering, systems optimization or scalability. Qualifications Core required qualifications • Demonstrated hands-on expertise designing and optimizing systems across the full stack: frontend to infrastructure. • Proven experience leading performance initiatives that delivered measurable business impact (latency improvements, cost reductions, customer experience gains). • Strong proficiency with performance profiling, APM tools, load testing and observability platforms. • Deep understanding of systems design trade-offs: latency vs. throughput, consistency vs. performance, feature richness vs. simplicity. • Experience mentoring and developing technical talent; demonstrated leadership in building high-performing teams. • Strong communication skills; ability to explain performance concepts and trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders. • Comfort working with cloud infrastructure, container orchestration and cost management; understanding of cloud architecture patterns. Preferred qualifications • 10+ years of software engineering experience with 7+ years in performance engineering, systems optimization or platform engineering roles. • Track record of transforming engineering cultures toward performance-first thinking; demonstrated ability to drive organizational change around performance priorities. • Experience optimizing large-scale distributed systems; deep expertise in database optimization, caching architectures or microservices performance. • Demonstrated success leading cost optimization initiatives, including infrastructure spend reduction and operational efficiency improvements. • Experience with emerging technology performance challenges: AI/ML inference, generative AI systems, agentic architectures, real-time data processing. • Published technical content, open-source contributions, or thought leadership in performance engineering and systems optimization. We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships. IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters–at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting-edge. At IFS, we’re flexible, we’re innovative, and we’re focused not only on how we can engage with our customers but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society’s greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust. We celebrate diversity and understand our responsibility to reflect the diverse world we work in. We are committed to promoting an inclusive workforce that fully represents the many different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints of our customers, our partners, and our communities. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view. By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world. We’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs. With the power of our AI-driven solutions, we empower our team to change the status quo and make a real difference. If you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.