Director Reliability, Automation & Performance Engineering

Overview Director Reliability, Automation & Performance Engineering Location: Dallas, TX Job Type: Hybrid Position Summary: Catalyst Brands is seeking a strategic, execution-focused Director, Reliability, Automation & Performance Engineering to lead critical Digital Engineering capabilities across Reliability Engineering, Performance Engineering, and Automation Engineering. This role will be responsible for building a horizontal Digital Engineering capability that supports JCPenney, Aéropostale, Lucky Brand, Brooks Brothers, and Nautica. The Director will establish common reliability, performance, and automation standards across Digital platforms while enabling the Unified Digital Platform transformation. The leader will own Site Reliability Engineering, mature Performance Engineering into a customer experience and scalability engineering discipline, and establish a modern automation platform leveraging AI, reusable frameworks, and self-service capabilities. This role will also provide leadership across strategic partner teams and enable engineering teams to deliver faster, safer, and more reliable digital capabilities. As a key member of the Digital Engineering & Platforms leadership team, Director, Reliability, Automation & Performance Engineering will drive operational excellence, production readiness, performance governance, intelligent automation, and customer experience outcomes across Catalyst Brands’ digital ecosystem. Key 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. • Lead incident management, problem management, major incident response, and executive communications for critical production issues. • Improve MTTR, reduce recurring incidents, and strengthen root cause analysis discipline. • 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 • Stay deeply engaged in architecture and design decisions—able to whiteboard, code-review, and challenge assumptions.• 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 – Understands how customer experience and performance drive revenue impact.• Retail Technologist – Understands how technology drives value across the full retail value chain.• Strategic & Hands-On – Equally comfortable in strategy and architectural deep dives.• Change Agent – Inspires confidence, energizes teams, and leads transformation with clarity and courage.• Outcome-Obsessed – Focuses relentlessly on delivering customer and business impact—not just tech output.• Disciplined Innovator – Encourages experimentation while building for scale, reliability, and performance.• Platform-Oriented – Balances brand differentiation with enterprise scale.• Inclusive Leader – Builds diverse, empowered teams and strong culture. What you Get:Enjoy a rewarding career at Catalyst, where we offer a competitive benefits package, a vibrant work environment, and the opportunity to make a difference with America's most iconic retail brands.• Generous benefits: Medical/dental/vision insurance starting on day one, term life insurance, paid vacation/holidays, 401(k) Savings Plan with company match, and an associate discount on merchandise across all Catalyst Brands.• Opportunities for growth and development: We are committed to helping our employees grow their careers and develop their skills. We offer a variety of training and development programs, as well as opportunities for advancement.• Collaborative and supportive culture: We believe in creating a workplace where everyone feels valued and respected. We encourage teamwork and collaboration, and we are always looking for ways to support our employees' success. About Catalyst: Catalyst Brands reflects the bringing together the rich heritages of our brands with modern excitement and a new vision for success. Five iconic brands came together under a unified powerhouse portfolio to celebrate the essence of American style. We will leverage our rich history, resources and best-in-class industry talent to further build the success of our brands. At Catalyst we are united in one shared purpose: We exist to ignite America’s most beloved retail brands to make fashion accessible to all. For more opportunities to join our team please visit our careers page. Pay Range USD $135,150.00 - USD $225,250.00 /Yr.