Staff Software Engineer

Secure Every Identity, from AI to Human

Identity is the key to unlocking the potential of AI. Okta secures AI by building the trusted, neutral infrastructure that enables organizations to safely embrace this new era. This work requires a relentless drive to solve complex challenges with real-world stakes. We are looking for builders and owners who operate with speed and urgency and execute with excellence.

This is an opportunity to do career-defining work. We're all in on this mission. If you are too, let's talk.

About the Role

At Okta, our motto is "Always On" and nowhere do we embrace that more than in Technical Operations. We strive to build the most reliable and performant systems on the planet through the skillful use of automation. If you like to be challenged and have a passion for solving large-scale automation, testing, and tuning problems, we would love to hear from you. The ideal candidate is someone who exemplifies the ethics of, “If you have to do something more than once, automate it” and who can rapidly self-educate on new concepts and tools.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Design, build, and operate highly scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure powering our production systems across AWS and GCP.
• Lead major reliability and modernization initiatives, including container platform migrations (e.g., ECS to EKS/GKE) and microservice enablement across multi-cloud environments.
• Serve as a technical authority in Kubernetes (EKS and GKE), cloud infrastructure (AWS and GCP), and modern CI/CD practices (GitOps, automation pipelines).
• Partner with development teams to architect and enable microservice-based applications, ensuring production readiness, scalability, and observability.
• Implement and manage infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible) to automate provisioning, scaling, and configuration management across multiple cloud providers.
• Drive improvements in observability, performance, and cost efficiency through robust monitoring, logging, and alerting systems that span AWS and GCP.
• Champion SRE best practices — defining SLOs/SLIs, conducting blameless postmortems, and continuously improving incident response.
• Lead complex technical projects from conception to completion, managing timelines, and technical dependencies across teams.
• Mentor engineers across teams, fostering a culture of reliability, automation, and continuous learning.
• Collaborate with security and compliance partners to ensure infrastructure adheres to best practices and standards (e.g., IAM Federation, Workload Identity).
• Participate in the on-call rotation, using incidents as learning opportunities to enhance systems and processes.

What You’ll Bring to the Role:

• Strong hands-on experience architecting and operating cloud-native distributed systems (AWS and GCP).
• Deep expertise with Kubernetes (EKS and GKE) — design, provisioning, scaling, and advanced troubleshooting in production.
• Proven experience leading ECS to EKS/GKE migrations and driving microservice enablement initiatives at scale.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform (multi-provider), Ansible, or CloudFormation.
• Solid coding and scripting ability in Python, Go, or Shell, with a focus on automation, tooling, and operational excellence.
• Advanced understanding of CI/CD pipelines (ArgoCD, GitLab CI, Spinnaker), Linux systems, and networking fundamentals (Direct Connect/Interconnect, DNS, routing, load balancing).
• Experience managing databases and caching systems (e.g., RDS/Cloud SQL, Redis/Memorystore, PostgreSQL, MySQL) in cloud environments.
• Hands-on experience with observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Loki, OpenTelemetry, Google Cloud Operations) for performance and reliability insights.
• Working knowledge of container security, secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Google Secret Manager), and compliance in production environments.
• Strong communication and problem-solving skills, with demonstrated success leading cross-team projects and mentoring peers.

Experience:

• 6+ years in SRE, DevOps, or Infrastructure Engineering roles.
• 3–5 years of experience with Kubernetes (EKS/GKE) and related ecosystem tools (Helm, Karpenter, etc.) in production.
• 3–5 years of experience with AWS and GCP.
• 3–5 years using Terraform to manage multi-cloud infrastructure.
• 3+ years of coding experience in Python, Go, or similar languages.
• Proven track record leading high-impact projects, specifically migration projects (ECS → EKS/GKE) and enabling microservice architectures.
• Experience implementing SLOs/SLIs, performing root cause analyses, and improving operational resilience.
• Prior work in SaaS or high-scale, cloud-native environments is a strong plus.
• Strong Linux and security fundamentals.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent hands-on experience.

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The Okta Experience

• Supporting Your Well-Being
• Driving Social Impact
• Developing Talent and Fostering Connection + Community

We are intentional about connection. Our global community, spanning over 20 offices worldwide, is united by a drive to innovate. Your journey begins with an immersive, in-person onboarding experience designed to accelerate your impact and connect you to our mission and team from day one.

Okta is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, or status as a protected veteran. We also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and convictions records, consistent with applicable laws.

If reasonable accommodation is needed to complete any part of the job application, interview process, or onboarding please use this Form to request an accommodation.

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