Staff Software Engineer, Non-human Identity

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

Okta is building the infrastructure to secure AI, focusing on non-human identity management. This Staff Software Engineer role will architect and build a high-performance, low-latency secrets engine for machines, services, and applications, handling massive scale and ensuring reliability. The role requires deep expertise in Go, distributed systems, and secure systems development.

What you'd actually do

  1. Partner with principal engineers and architects to design and implement a low-latency, high-throughput secrets engine for non-human identities
  2. Write highly concurrent, performance-critical code capable of handling millions of machine-to-machine authentication and authorization requests
  3. 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. As a senior engineer on the team, you will work with junior engineers to help them advance their SDLC expertise.
  5. 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
  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience
  • 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
  • optimizing systems for performance, latency, and throughput
  • diagnose complex, multi-system issues
  • making significant contributions to the architecture of complex, mission-critical systems

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
  • Deep expertise in backend systems engineering
  • Experience building and scaling beyond standard three-tier monolithic architectures, with a focus on modern distributed systems
  • Worked on projects with complex, established systems
  • Significant, hands-on experience in a Linux/Unix environment

What the JD emphasized

  • low-latency, high-throughput secrets engine
  • highly concurrent, performance-critical code
  • millions of machine-to-machine authentication and authorization requests
  • defining the long-term technical roadmap for scalability and performance
  • Deep, hands-on expertise in multi-platform Go development and building high-performance, concurrent applications
  • Experience designing or operating distributed systems
  • Experience with secure systems (authn/authz, encryption, TLS, token handling, PKI, CAs, diagnosing TLS issues)
  • Deep expertise in distributed storage systems, with a focus on replication, backup, and restore, and data management.
  • Direct experience designing, building, or contributing to a secrets management, service mesh, or machine identity platform
  • Expert-level at ergonomic API design (gRPC/openAPI), and building for reliability at scale
  • Deep knowledge of cloud-native infrastructure
  • driven by the challenge of optimizing systems for performance, latency, and throughput, with a proven ability to diagnose complex, multi-system issues
  • proven track record of making significant contributions to the architecture of complex, mission-critical systems