Staff Software Engineer, Passwordless

Okta Okta · Enterprise · Toronto, ON · SW Eng - Core Identity-670

Okta is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their Passwordless team. This role involves technical leadership in building secure and seamless authentication solutions, focusing on passkeys and FIDO2 WebAuthn. The engineer will own features end-to-end, mentor others, and drive technical direction for a large user base. The role emphasizes building scalable, reliable, and secure distributed systems within the identity and access management domain, with a strong connection to enabling AI adoption through secure identity infrastructure.

What you'd actually do

  1. Partner closely with product, design, and other cross-functional stakeholders to own problem spaces and ensure we are building the right solutions for our customers.
  2. Independently own and deliver major features from conception and design through to deployment and monitoring, tackling ambiguous problems along the way.
  3. Act as a technical leader within the team, driving design discussions, influencing the roadmap, and making strategic trade-offs that improve team velocity and product health.
  4. Mentor other engineers through code reviews, knowledge sharing, and by setting an example of engineering craft and operational excellence.
  5. Champion a data-driven culture by leveraging telemetry and observability tools to troubleshoot complex production incidents and guide technical decisions

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of professional software development experience
  • demonstrated history of technical leadership and mentorship
  • Deep expertise in Java
  • strong understanding of object-oriented design
  • multithreading
  • building high-performance services
  • Proven experience designing, building, and operating complex, large-scale distributed systems in a cloud environment (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • A strong grasp of architectural patterns for scalability, reliability, and security
  • ability to lead technical design discussions and make informed trade-offs
  • Excellent problem-solving skills
  • ability to independently debug and remediate issues in complex, unfamiliar codebases and systems
  • A proactive and ownership-driven mindset
  • ability to manage your own priorities and spot areas for future work
  • Strong communication and collaboration skills
  • history of working effectively with cross-functional teams to deliver impactful products
  • Deep knowledge of phishing-resistant authentication methods, including Passkeys, FIDO2, or WebAuthn
  • Experience in identity and access management (IAM)
  • protocols like OAuth, OIDC, and SAML

Nice to have

  • Experience with modern frontend frameworks (e.g., React, Angular, Vue.js)

What the JD emphasized

  • building highly reliable, scalable systems
  • ownership of end-to-end solutions
  • complex technical challenges
  • ambiguous problems
  • technical leadership
  • scalability, reliability, and security
  • complex, large-scale distributed systems
  • debug and remediate issues in complex, unfamiliar codebases and systems