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.

Position Description

We are looking for an experienced Staff Software Engineer to work on our next-generation Imports Platform team. Imports Platform team is leading a strategic initiative to modernize Okta's identity lifecycle management capabilities by architecting and migrating from a legacy monolithic system to a highly scalable, distributed microservices platform. This critical service orchestrates the importing, syncing, and provisioning of identities and access policies—users, groups, roles, entitlements—from external directory services including Active Directory, Office 365, and LDAP-based systems.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Imports Platform team, you will be a technical leader who independently owns projects end-to-end, from ideation and architectural design through implementation, deployment, and operational excellence. You will drive technical strategy, make critical architectural decisions, and influence both your immediate team and cross-team initiatives. You'll work on complex distributed systems challenges including massive-scale batch processing, real-time synchronization, and user matching algorithms that serve thousands of enterprise customers.

This role requires strong technical leadership, strategic thinking, and the ability to balance short-term delivery with long-term platform health. You will mentor senior and junior engineers, partner with Product Management on feature strategy, and help shape the future of Okta's Imports platform.

This is a hybrid position requiring a blend of remote and in-office collaboration.

Job Duties and Responsibilities

- Provide technical leadership on major development projects, including architectural design and implementation strategy

- Independently own and deliver projects end-to-end within the team, including technical prioritization and tradeoffs

- Generate design ideas and solutions for ambiguous problems, taking complete ownership from conception through production impact

- Design and architect core, high-performance, scalable software components with full ownership of all production aspects (scalability, reliability, monitoring, alerting, resource efficiency, testing, documentation)

- Lead technical design discussions and guide the team in making architectural decisions

- Drive the migration strategy from monolithic to microservices architecture, including planning, scoping, and execution

- Interface extensively with cross-functional teams (Architects, QA, Product, Technical Support, Documentation, UX, and SRE) to deliver comprehensive import and sync solutions

- Analyze and refine requirements with Product Management, partnering on product features and helping define the "how"

- Conduct code reviews with focus on systems design, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and maintainability

- Share knowledge widely, coordinate across teams, and manage risk and dependencies for projects

- Work with QA and SRE teams to define comprehensive testing strategies and operational excellence practices

- Independently troubleshoot complex production incidents spanning the home team, perform root cause analysis, and drive operational improvement projects

- Use data and metrics to drive technical decisions and validate the impact of architectural changes

- Mentor and provide technical guidance to senior and junior engineers on the team

- Help resolve difficult customer issues and work closely with Field teams and CSMs to identify patterns and drive product improvements

- Participate in group strategy discussions and help break down strategic initiatives into actionable technical milestones

- Proactively identify and advocate for improvements in team velocity, engineering practices, and operational processes

- Drive improvements in observability, monitoring, and production support capabilities

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

The ideal candidate is someone who is experienced in building and architecting software systems to manage and deploy reliable and performant infrastructure and product code at massive scale on cloud infrastructure.

- 7+ years of software development experience building highly-reliable, mission-critical software at scale

- Deep expertise with object-oriented languages, particularly Java, with proven ability to architect large-scale systems

- Expert-level knowledge of Spring Boot framework, Maven, and modern Java development practices

- Deep understanding of infrastructure-level technologies: distributed systems, caching strategies, stream processing, resilient architectures

- Solid experience with data stores including relational databases (MySQL), caching layers (Redis), and cloud storage (S3)

- Experience with one or more Directory services: Active Directory, LDAP, Office 365, Azure AD

- Strong experience with RESTful APIs, gRPC, and microservices architecture patterns

- Proven track record of working with systems at massive scale, including batch processing and real-time sync capabilities

- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) including services like SQS, S3, and multi-region architectures

- Strong understanding of distributed job processing, message queues, and event-driven architectures

- Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects independently and influence cross-team initiatives

- Excellent communication skills with ability to share information widely and coordinate across teams

- Strong mentorship capabilities with experience guiding senior and junior engineers

- Customer-focused mindset with experience working with Field teams to resolve complex issues

- Strategic thinking ability to participate in and contribute to platform strategy

- Experience with operational excellence including incident management, root cause analysis, and driving systemic improvements

Nice to Haves

- Experience with Protocol Buffers (Protos) and building event-driven systems

- Experience with server-side technologies including advanced caching, asynchronous processing, multi-threading, and concurrency patterns

- Experience in Test-Driven Development (TDD) and automated testing strategies

- Deep knowledge of Identity and Access Management protocols and technologies: OAuth, OpenID Connect, SAML, SCIM, LDAP

- Experience with Microsoft Azure management APIs, Microsoft Graph API, Office 365, or ADFS

- Experience automating and deploying large-scale production services in AWS, GCP, or similar cloud platforms

- Experience with feature flag frameworks and gradual rollout strategies for large-scale migrations

- Understanding of user matching, correlation algorithms, and identity resolution at scale

- Experience with observability platforms, creating comprehensive monitoring and alerting strategies

- Experience migrating monolithic applications to microservices architecture

- Knowledge of data modeling for graph databases and relationship management

- Experience with incremental sync, delta detection, and change data capture patterns

- Background in building resilient systems with retry logic, circuit breakers, and failure handling

- Experience with performance optimization and capacity planning for high-throughput systems

Education and Training

B.S. Computer Science or related field

#LI-Hybrid

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