Director Reliability, Automation & Performance Engineering

Overview

Director Reliability, Automation & Performance Engineering

Location:

Dallas, TX
Job Type: Hybrid

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Embed a product-engineering mindset that…