Director Performance Engineering Jobs in Durham, NC

This is a remote role that may only be hired in the following location(s): AZ, NC, TX.

This is a critical leadership role that sits at the intersection of technology strategy, engineering excellence, product partnership, and operational reliability. We are seeking a senior digital engineering leader with experience building and scaling custom banking platforms in a highly regulated, fast-paced, future focused environment. 

We are seeking a highly accomplished Director, Digital Technology Engineering to lead a global organization of approximately 40 software engineering professionals responsible for the development, testing, delivery, and production support of our custom-built Commercial Banking digital platform. 

This leader will own the end-to-end technology delivery lifecycle across multiple modules of our web and mobile banking platform, including software engineering design and development, quality engineering, release management, platform integrity, and Tier 4 production support. The role is accountable for ensuring the platform remains scalable, secure, resilient, and aligned with long-term business and technology objectives. 

The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise, exceptional people leadership, strong product partnership capabilities, and a passion for engineering excellence. They will play a key role in advancing our digital transformation strategy while operating within a highly regulated, security-first banking environment. 

Engineering Leadership & Delivery 

• Lead and develop a global engineering organization of approximately 40 professionals across the United States and India. 
• Own end-to-end delivery of multiple commercial banking digital platform capabilities across web, mobile, APIs, and supporting platform services. 
• Ensure predictable delivery of business features and strategic initiatives on schedule, within budget, and aligned with business objectives. 
• Drive a culture of accountability, innovation, continuous improvement, and engineering excellence. 
• Build and retain high-performing engineering teams through coaching, mentoring, succession planning, and talent development. 

Product & Business Partnership 

• Establish deep partnerships with Product Management, Business stakeholders, Architecture, Cybersecurity, Risk, Compliance, and Operations teams. 
• Help to translate product vision and business priorities into scalable technology solutions and execution plans. 
• Partner closely with product leaders to balance feature delivery with technical debt reduction, modernization efforts, and platform sustainability. 
• Act as a trusted technology advisor to business and technology leadership teams. 

Technology Strategy & Platform Ownership 

• Own the technology roadmap for assigned platform domains, ensuring architectural integrity and long-term return on technology investments. 
• Drive modernization initiatives that improve scalability, resiliency, maintainability, security, and operational efficiency. 
• Ensure alignment between engineering delivery, enterprise architecture standards, and strategic technology direction. 
• Maintain accountability for platform health, stability, performance, reliability, and technical risk management. 

Engineering Excellence & Operational Discipline 

• Champion best practices across software engineering, quality engineering, DevSecOps, CI/CD, observability, and production operations. 
• Ensure the platform meets or exceeds all non-functional requirements (NFRs) including performance, scalability, availability, recoverability, observability, and maintainability. 
• Establish and monitor engineering KPIs and service level objectives for quality, reliability, delivery predictability, and operational excellence. 
• Provide executive-level visibility into platform health, delivery progress, engineering metrics, and operational performance. 

Risk, Security & Compliance 

• Ensure adherence to all enterprise security, privacy, accessibility (ADA/WCAG), risk management, and regulatory requirements. 
• Embed security-first engineering practices throughout the software development lifecycle. 
• Partner closely with Cybersecurity, Risk, Audit, and Compliance teams to maintain a strong control environment. 
• Ensure technology solutions satisfy banking regulatory expectations and enterprise governance standards. 

Continuous Improvement & Enterprise Leadership 

• Drive continuous improvement and standardization across the broader digital technology organization. 
• Contribute horizontally across Commercial Digital Services to strengthen engineering processes, governance, delivery practices, and NFR outcomes. 
• Lead initiatives focused on improving software quality, resiliency, delivery effectiveness, and operational maturity. 
• Foster a culture of measurement, transparency, and continuous learning. 

Qualifications:

Bachelor's Degree and 8 years of experience in Information Technology including application development, support roles, and management. OR High School Diploma or GED and 12 years of experience in Information Technology including application development, support roles, and management.

• 12+ years of progressive software engineering experience with at least 5+ years leading large engineering organizations
• Proven experience leading teams of 25+ engineers, architects, QA professionals, and engineering managers in a global delivery model
• Demonstrated success building and scaling custom-developed digital platforms rather than implementing commercial off-the-shelf solutions
• Experience leading technology modernization and digital transformation initiatives within complex enterprise environments
• Strong track record delivering large-scale web and mobile applications in regulated industries such as Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, or other highly controlled environments
• Hands-on understanding of modern software engineering, cloud-native patterns, DevSecOps, and distributed systems
• Experience managing full software development lifecycle including development, testing, release management, production support, and operational excellence
• Strong executive communication and stakeholder management skills
• Experience operating in Agile delivery environments at enterprise scale
• Deep knowledge of secure software development practices and regulatory compliance frameworks
• Vendor contract management & strong negotiation skills 
• Financial budget discipline and forecast management 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Commercial Banking, Treasury Management, Cash Management, Payments, Lending, or Financial Services domain experience
• Experience leading engineering teams supporting customer-facing digital banking platforms
• Experience working in cloud and hybrid-cloud environments
• Experience implementing accessibility standards and modern digital customer experience practices
• Prior experience managing globally distributed teams  

Technical Environment 

Experience with many of the following technologies is highly desirable: 

• React.js, JavaScript, TypeScript leveraging an API-driven microservices architecture backend on a containerized platform 
• Red Hat OpenShift, RESTful APIs and event-driven architectures, Elasticsearch 
• Modern automation, testing, deployment, and release pipelines, Enterprise-grade platform monitoring, logging, alerting, and performance management 

Benefits are an integral part of total rewards and First Citizens Bank is committed to providing a competitive, thoughtfully designed and quality benefits program to meet the needs of our associates. More information can be found at https://jobs.firstcitizens.com/benefits.

Benefits are an integral part of total rewards and First Citizens Bank is committed to providing a competitive, thoughtfully designed and quality benefits program to meet the needs of our associates. More information can be found at https://jobs.firstcitizens.com/benefits.