Director Reliability, Automation & Performance Engineering
About the role
The Director, Reliability, Automation & Performance Engineering will lead critical Digital Engineering capabilities across Reliability Engineering, Performance Engineering, and Automation Engineering. This role will support JCPenney, Aéropostale, Lucky Brand, Brooks Brothers, and Nautica, establishing common standards and transforming Performance Engineering into a strategic discipline.
Responsibilities
Lead Digital Reliability Engineering and Operational Excellence
Own the Site Reliability Engineering strategy across Catalyst Brands Digital platforms
Drive production stability, availability, observability, monitoring, and operational excellence
Establish reliability standards, governance, and operating practices across Digital Engineering
Partner with platform, infrastructure, product engineering, and security teams to improve production readiness and reduce operational risk
Expand self-healing capabilities, automated remediation, and intelligent alerting
Strengthen peak readiness practices for promotional events, holiday traffic, and high-volume digital moments
Lead Performance Engineering Across Digital Brands
Transform Performance Engineering from a testing-focused function into a strategic discipline focused on customer experience, scalability, capacity planning, and release readiness
Ensure digital experience channels such as website and mobile apps are fast, resilient, and scalable
Establish release-level performance certification, performance baselines, customer journey validation, and governance across JCPenney, Aéropostale, Lucky Brand, Brooks Brothers, and Nautica
Partner with product engineering teams to shift performance validation earlier in the SDLC and improve site speed, search, browse, PDP, checkout, and mobile performance
Lead Digital Automation Strategy & AI-Enabled Engineering Capabilities
Define and lead the Digital test automation strategy, common automation platform, reusable frameworks, governance model, and self-service capabilities
Drive AI-assisted test generation, intelligent test selection, self-healing automation, CI/CD integration, and daily or on-demand automated test execution
Reduce fragmented tooling, duplicate POCs, and manual validation effort while improving automation adoption, quality, and release confidence
Improve Lead Time for Change (LTFC) DORA KPI by leveraging automation to reduce test cycle time
Build and Scale High-Performance Engineering Teams
Attract, develop, and retain top-tier engineering talent with a focus on inclusion and global capability building
Lead cross-functional performance, automation and reliability engineering squads with clear ownership and accountability
Embed performance, test automation, and SRE best practices
Coach engineering managers and senior engineers to deliver with speed and quality
Champion Engineering Excellence and Culture
Embed a product-engineering mindset that prioritizes business outcomes, customer experience, and rapid learning cycles
Drive responsible AI adoption to enhance engineering productivity, quality, and innovation
Improve DORA metrics and engineering performance benchmarks
Reduce technical debt and modernize legacy components
Strengthen platform reliability, security, and observability
Foster a culture of innovation, psychological safety, and continuous improvement across distributed teams
Be a Hands-On Technical Leader and Architecture Coach
Mentor senior engineers and architects to ensure alignment between business strategy and technical delivery
Create frameworks that balance enterprise standardization with purposeful innovation
Partner Across the Business to Deliver Scalable Digital Solutions
Collaborate with technology, and business leaders to convert strategic goals into scalable tech capabilities
Enable differentiated experiences through high performing modular web front ends, real-time APIs, and mobile applications
Support brand differentiation while leveraging shared enterprise platforms
Act as a Performance & Reliability SME on digital web and mobile experiences
Qualifications
12+ years of progressive engineering leadership, including 5+ years leading reliability, performance, automation, platform, or digital engineering functions in retail, digital commerce, or consumer tech environments
Deep expertise in modern web architectures, headless CMS, APIs, and microservices
Strong experience in Site Reliability Engineering, production operations, observability, incident management, problem management, and operational excellence
Deep understanding of performance engineering practices including load testing, scalability engineering, capacity planning, release certification, customer journey validation, and performance benchmarking
Experience building or leading test automation platforms, automation frameworks, engineering enablement capabilities, or quality engineering transformation
Strong understanding of modern digital commerce architectures, including web, mobile, APIs, microservices, cloud platforms, distributed systems, and event-driven architectures
Experience supporting high-volume, customer-facing, revenue-critical digital platforms
Strong knowledge of cloud and platform technologies such as AWS, Azure, Kubernetes/EKS, Jenkins, Kafka, CDN technologies, monitoring platforms, and modern DevOps practices
Experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Dynatrace, Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, Catchpoint, CloudWatch, ELK, or equivalent platforms
Proven ability to establish standards, governance, operating models, and metrics across multiple teams
Familiarity with core retail systems (eCommerce, ERP, POS, OMS, loyalty) and their integration with customer-facing experiences
Demonstrated success leading global, distributed engineering teams and driving measurable business impact
Ability to translate business goals into technical strategy in fast-paced, agile environments
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, or related technical field preferred
Leadership Attributes: Customer-Obsessed, Retail Technologist, Strategic & Hands-On, Change Agent, Outcome-Obsessed, Disciplined Innovator, Platform-Oriented, Inclusive Leader
Pay
USD $135,150.00 - USD $225,250.00 /Yr.