Director, Site Reliability Engineering

Okta•San Francisco, CA

1d•$246,000 - $378,400•Hybrid

About The Position

Okta is seeking a technical leader to oversee the Site Reliability Engineering organization supporting emerging products, including Workflows, PAM/ASA, and Inbox. Okta authenticates, authorizes, and provisions millions of users daily through a high-throughput service hosted on AWS across multiple availability zones and geographically separated regions, designed for 99.999% availability. The director will scale the service by building a strong organization and advancing reliable, cost-effective, and efficient infrastructure, processes, and tooling. The role defines and executes SRE strategy in alignment with global reliability goals, partners with engineering, product, and infrastructure leaders, and leads a global organization focused on resilient, scalable, and secure services. The director will develop people and teams, strengthen incident response and learning practices, promote automation and observability, and advance modern cloud infrastructure practices and self-service platforms. The position also improves cloud infrastructure software development and delivery processes, including CI/CD pipelines, change management, and release management. Okta offers a flexible approach to work: where appropriate, employees may work from an office or from home. The employee must be physically located on U.S. soil, defined as the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or U.S. outlying areas under FAR 2.101. The position's listed annual base salary ranges vary by location: $275,000–$378,400 for the San Francisco Bay Area, and $246,000–$337,700 for California excluding the Bay Area, Colorado, Illinois, New York, and Washington. Okta also offers equity where applicable, a bonus, and benefits.

Requirements

15 or more years of experience in site reliability, infrastructure, or production engineering roles.
8 or more years of technical leadership and people-management experience, including managing managers.
Strong expertise in automation, observability, performance optimization, and incident response.
Excellent leadership, communication, and cross-cultural collaboration skills, particularly in a global matrixed environment.
Experience building and scaling offshore SRE teams that partner with global counterparts.
At least 4 years of experience running an SRE organization supporting a SaaS or cloud service in a public cloud; AWS is preferred.
Strong expertise in cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines.
Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams and manage large-scale programs.
Effective verbal and written communication and interpersonal skills.
Computer Science degree, related degree, or equivalent experience.
Must be located on U.S. soil: one of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or U.S. outlying areas as defined in FAR 2.101.

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting a multi-cloud environment.

Responsibilities

Build and lead a high-caliber SRE organization supporting Okta’s production fleet.
Partner with global engineering, product, and infrastructure leaders to deliver resilient, scalable, and secure services.
Define and execute the SRE strategy in alignment with global reliability goals.
Lead post-incident reviews, drive root-cause analysis, and ensure long-term corrective actions.
Participate in incident management, on-call rotations, and blameless root-cause analyses.
Implement automation and observability to reduce manual toil and improve operational efficiency.
Drive adoption of modern infrastructure practices, including Terraform, Kubernetes, and AI within the SRE organization.
Hire, mentor, and develop SRE talent and build an engineering culture centered on reliability and innovation.
Foster collaboration across global teams.
Promote continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and process improvement.
Maintain knowledge of industry best practices, evolving trends, and technologies.
Manage service and business expectations and prioritize resource allocation.
Accelerate SRE and product engineering velocity by developing robust platforms, powerful tooling, and intuitive self-service capabilities.
Improve software development lifecycle processes for cloud infrastructure as code, including CI/CD pipeline maturity, change management, and release management.