Director, Engineering, SDET & Performance

Alkami is a leading cloud-based digital banking solutions provider for financial institutions in the United States that helps clients to transform through retail and business banking, digital account opening and loan origination, payment fraud prevention, and data analytics and engagement solutions. Alkami’s Mobile App Platform has been certified by J.D. Power for providing clients with “An Outstanding Mobile Banking Platform Experience.”

Founded in 2009, we continue to be recognized for our intentional culture and tremendous growth (Best Place to Work in Fintech; Best & Brightest to Work For Nationally; and Comparably’s Best Company Culture, Best Career Growth, Best Engineering Team, and Best Places to Work in Dallas, among others). Through our bold investments in technology and people, we empower our clients to grow confidently, adapt quickly, and build thriving digital banking communities through tailored experiences for over 19.5M users.

As a remote-first company, most of our positions can be remote in the US, except for key roles, which will be indicated in the Job Title.

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As the Director of Engineering, SDET, Performance & GenAI Quality Engineering, you will be a key technology leader responsible for setting and executing the strategic vision for automation, performance, and AI-driven quality engineering. You will lead multiple teams focused on test automation, performance engineering, validation tooling, and adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) to improve engineering velocity, product quality, and team productivity.
This is a hands-on, forward-looking leadership role that combines deep technical knowledge with strategic execution. You will collaborate cross-functionally to scale modern quality practices, integrate AI into development workflows, and deliver reliable, scalable, and customer-centric software experiences.

Key Responsibilities

Quality & Performance Engineering Leadership

• Define and execute a long-term strategy for quality and performance engineering across the platform.
   

• Lead and mentor engineering managers and senior ICs across test automation, quality tooling, and performance domains.
   

• Build reusable, scalable automation frameworks and performance infrastructure across Web, Mobile, API, and backend systems.
   

• Drive continuous validation strategies: shift-left testing, contract testing, observability-based quality, CI/CD quality gates.
   

GenAI Integration & Innovation

• Lead adoption and experimentation of Generative AI tools to accelerate test case generation, test coverage analysis, root cause identification, and engineering productivity.
   

• Evaluate and implement GenAI platforms (e.g., GitHub Copilot, custom LLM-based QA bots) to reduce manual effort in test creation, documentation, and diagnostics.
   

Execution, Risk & Metrics

• Own and track key quality and performance KPIs (e.g., defect escape rate, automation coverage, MTTR, NFR adherence).
   

• Partner with release and site reliability teams to ensure production resilience and pre-release risk coverage.
   

• Use a data-driven approach to make decisions, inform roadmap tradeoffs, and identify continuous improvement opportunities.
   

Team Development & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Attract, hire, and develop top talent across SDET and performance engineering roles.
   

• Foster a high-performance, inclusive, and learning-oriented culture.
   

• Work closely with Product, DevOps, Platform, and Security to align on delivery expectations, architecture, and quality gates.
   

• Serve as a trusted thought partner and advisor to executive leadership on quality and innovation.
   

Qualifications

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
   

• 15+ years in software engineering or quality leadership, including:
   

  • 5+ years as a senior leader managing managers in automation and performance engineering.
     

• Demonstrated success leading high-impact quality organizations across large-scale, distributed systems.
   

• Expertise with tools such as Playwright, Selenium, Appium, JUnit, TestNG, RestAssured, Postman, JMeter, Gatling.
   

• Strong programming experience in Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, C#, or Python.
   

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, cloud-native services (AWS preferred), and performance optimization.
   

• Experience defining and adopting GenAI tools within engineering orgs (e.g., test generation, assistant bots, diagnostics).
   

• Deep understanding of performance testing strategies, observability, test data management, and environment scaling.
   

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills with a proven ability to influence across teams and levels.
   

Preferred:

• Master’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or Business.
   

• Experience working in regulated industries such as FinTech, banking, or healthcare.
   

• Familiarity with LLM technologies, AI safety, prompt engineering, or open-source GenAI frameworks.
   

• Knowledge of SonarQube, JaCoCo, Grafana, and white-box testing approaches.
   

• Strong background in both functional and non-functional testing in a cloud-native, microservices environment.

The salary range for this position is: $187,680 - $281,520Cool Things to Know

Not Just Any Company: Alkami has an awesome diverse and inclusive environment. We have a FUN culture and offer great benefits, including remote-first environment, unlimited paid time off, 401(k) with employer match, and more.

Work Authorization: We cannot offer employment sponsorship at this time. Candidates must be eligible to work in the US for full-time employment.

Recruiters: We are not looking for outside recruiting firms to help us in this search. Thank you for understanding.

Pay Transparency: As of January 1, 2023, new states and locales have enacted pay equity laws that require more pay transparency by employers in the following states: California, Colorado (effective January 1, 2021), Connecticut, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington.

The Important Stuff

Alkami Technology is an Equal Opportunity Employer and Prohibits Discrimination and Harassment of Any Kind: Alkami is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Alkami are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, national, social or ethnic origin, sex (including pregnancy), age, physical, mental or sensory disability, HIV Status, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, family medical history or genetic information, family or parental status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Alkami will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Alkami encourages applicants of all ages.

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J.D. Power 2024 Mobile App Platform Certification ProgramSM recognition is based on successful completion of an audit and exceeding a customer experience benchmark through a survey of recent servicing interactions. For more information, visit jdpower.com/awards.