Director, Site Reliability Engineering

Okta•San Francisco, WA

12d•Hybrid

About The Position

Okta is seeking a technical leader to oversee its Site Reliability Engineering organization, supporting emerging products including Workflows, PAM/ASA, and Inbox. Okta’s services authenticate, authorize, and provision millions of users daily and run on AWS across multiple availability zones and geographically separated regions, with a focus on high throughput and 99.999% availability. The Director will build and lead a high-caliber SRE organization and help scale reliable, cost-effective, and efficient infrastructure, processes, and tooling. The role partners with global engineering, product, and infrastructure leaders to deliver resilient, scalable, and secure services. It defines and executes SRE strategy aligned with global reliability goals, improves incident response and operational efficiency, and advances infrastructure practices such as Terraform, Kubernetes, and AI. The Director also hires and develops SRE talent, manages service and business expectations and resource allocation, and accelerates SRE and product engineering through robust platforms, tooling, self-service capabilities, and improved cloud infrastructure SDLC processes. The role is subject to Okta’s requirement that the employee be on U.S. soil, meaning one of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or U.S. outlying areas as defined in FAR 2.101. Okta describes its work approach as flexible, allowing employees in suitable roles to work from an office or home. The listed salary ranges vary by location, and the position may also include equity, bonus, and benefits.

Requirements

15+ years of experience in site reliability, infrastructure, or production engineering roles.
8+ years of experience in technical leadership and people management, 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 setup.
Experience building and scaling offshore SRE teams that partner with global counterparts.
4+ years of experience running an SRE organization supporting a SaaS/Cloud service in a public cloud, preferably AWS.
Strong expertise in cloud-native architectures, containerization (Kubernetes), infrastructure as code (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 or related degree, or equivalent experience.
Employee must be on U.S. soil, defined as the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or U.S. outlying areas under 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 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 RCAs.
Implement automation and observability to reduce manual toil and improve operational efficiency.
Drive adoption of modern infrastructure practices, including infrastructure as code (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 and 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 SDLC processes for cloud infrastructure as code, including CI/CD pipeline maturity and change and release management.