Staff Backend Engineer, Non Human Identities

Okta Okta · Enterprise · San Francisco, CA · SW Eng - Applications-674

Okta is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to architect and build the high-performance core of their non-human identity platform, which is described as the security layer between identities (human and non-human) and the systems they need to access. The role involves designing and implementing a low-latency, high-throughput secrets engine, handling massive scale for authentication and authorization requests, and shaping technical strategy for scalability and performance. The position requires deep expertise in Go, distributed systems, secure systems, and distributed storage, with a focus on backend and systems-level development.

What you'd actually do

  1. Contribute to Core Architecture: Partner with principal engineers and architects to design and implement a low-latency, high-throughput secrets engine for non-human identities
  2. Solve for Massive Scale: Write highly concurrent, performance-critical code capable of handling millions of machine-to-machine authentication and authorization requests
  3. Shape Technical Strategy: Play a key role in defining the long-term technical roadmap for scalability and performance, ensuring our platform can meet the demands of the largest enterprises
  4. Mentor and Elevate: As a senior engineer on the team, you will work with junior engineers to help them advance their SDLC expertise.
  5. On-Call: Participate in the rotational on-call activities with SRE and product development team

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
  • backend or systems-level development
  • multi-platform Go development
  • building high-performance, concurrent applications
  • designing or operating distributed systems
  • secure systems (authn/authz, encryption, TLS, token handling, PKI, CAs, diagnosing TLS issues)
  • distributed storage systems, with a focus on replication, backup, and restore, and data management
  • designing, building, or contributing to a secrets management, service mesh, or machine identity platform
  • ergonomic API design (gRPC/openAPI)
  • building for reliability at scale
  • cloud-native infrastructure

Nice to have

  • Experience at a leading Cybersecurity or Infrastructure-as-Code company
  • Contributions to open-source projects in the identity, security, or infrastructure space

What the JD emphasized

  • low-latency
  • high-throughput
  • highly concurrent
  • performance-critical
  • Massive Scale
  • millions of machine-to-machine authentication and authorization requests
  • largest enterprises
  • secure systems
  • distributed systems
  • high-performance
  • concurrent
  • resilient security software