Senior Director, Performance Engineering -Infrastructure and Reliability
IFS · Staines-upon-Thames, England, United Kingdom · hybrid
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.
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 perfor