Okta is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Privileged Access Management (PAM) team, building the future of identity for machines, services, and applications. You will architect and build the high-performance core of our non-human identity platform, forming the foundation for managing privileged access in the modern enterprise.
What You'll Do
- Partner with principal engineers to design and implement a low-latency, high-throughput secrets engine for non-human identities.
- Write highly concurrent, performance-critical code for millions of machine-to-machine authentication and authorization requests.
- Define the long-term technical roadmap for scalability and performance to meet large enterprise demands.
- Work with junior engineers to advance their SDLC expertise.
- Participate in rotational on-call activities with SRE and product development teams.
What We're Looking For
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with a focus on backend or systems-level development.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
- 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).
- Deep expertise in distributed storage systems (Postgres, etc.), focusing on replication, backup, 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.
- Proven ability to optimize systems for performance, latency, and throughput, diagnosing complex, multi-system issues.
- Track record of making significant contributions to the architecture of complex, mission-critical systems.
- Ability to access federal environments and/or protected federal data, requiring U.S. Person status documentation upon hire.
Nice to Have
- Experience at a leading Cybersecurity or Infrastructure-as-Code company.
- Contributions to open-source projects in identity, security, or infrastructure.
- Deep expertise in backend systems engineering.
- Experience building and scaling beyond standard monolithic architectures with modern distributed systems.
- Experience working on projects with complex, established systems.
- Significant, hands-on experience in a Linux/Unix environment.
Technical Stack
- Go
- Postgres
- gRPC
- openAPI
- TLS
- PKI
Team & Environment
You will be working on the Okta Privileged Access Management (PAM) team.
Benefits & Compensation
- Health, dental, and vision insurance
- 401(k)
- Flexible spending account
- Paid leave (including PTO and parental leave)
- Equity (where applicable)
- Bonus
- Compensation: $194,000—$267,000 USD (for candidates in San Francisco Bay Area) + equity where applicable
Work Mode
This is a hybrid position for candidates located in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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.
