Principal Software Engineer – Developer Platform (Auth0)

Okta•Toronto, ON

3d•CA$184,000 - CA$253,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Developer Platform team at Auth0 (an Okta company) owns the platform that developers build identity on. Increasingly they build alongside AI agents, and that raises the bar on everything underneath: interfaces have to hold up whether a person or an agent is calling them, and the systems behind them have to stay reliable and coherent as usage grows. We move fast, we own problems end to end, and we care deeply about the platform we put in front of the developers and agents who depend on it. We're hiring a Principal Engineer (P5) to serve as the technical leader and compass for the Developer Platform team. You'll work across the breadth of the platform, tackling the highly complex, vaguely specified problems that span it and turning them into clear technical direction the team can execute against, without day-to-day oversight. Above all, you'll own how the platform is architected to scale: the distributed systems behind it, the reliability and consistency guarantees developers depend on, and the coherence that keeps it easy to build on as usage grows. You'll champion the team's technical execution, raise the engineering bar, mentor the people around you, and partner with tech leads across teams to keep the wider platform aligned. You'll have real influence over how our platform holds up in a world where developers and agents are both first-class consumers.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record as a Principal or Staff level individual contributor.
Distributed architecture depth: Extensive experience designing and operating high-scale, reliable backend and event-driven systems, with a strong grasp of the tradeoffs in throughput, consistency, and failure handling.
Platform thinking: A track record of designing and shipping platforms or developer-facing systems at scale, with an instinct for the interfaces and abstractions that keep them coherent as they grow.
IAM platform thinking: Deep understanding of identity and access management, with a sense for the platform capabilities and abstractions that make identity easier for developers to build on.
Ownership in ambiguity: You can own vaguely specified problems and drive them to a clear technical direction without heavy top-down scoping.
Strong engineering fundamentals: Strong Node.js fundamentals; Go a plus.
Agent-aware design: Hands-on familiarity with agentic tooling, MCP, or LLM-facing design, and a sense for how agents consume a platform.
Cross-functional collaboration: Experience working across engineering, product, and architecture in a fast-moving environment, and a habit of raising the bar for the people around you.

Nice To Haves

Work with agent frameworks, AI-facing systems, or developer toolchains in the LLM space.
A background at a company where developers are the primary customer.
Experience setting technical direction for a platform that other engineering teams build on.

Responsibilities

Own the platform architecture: Set the technical direction for the developer platform, and make the cross-cutting decisions that keep it coherent and easy to build on as it grows.
Architect for scale: Design the distributed systems behind the platform for throughput, reliability, and consistency, so the guarantees developers depend on hold up under real load.
Turn ambiguity into direction: Take the hardest, most vaguely specified platform problems and turn them into clear, modular technical designs the team can execute against.
Design for developers and agents: Shape the platform so it holds up whether a person or an agent is calling it, and so both can build and automate their work against Auth0.
Raise the engineering bar: Set the standard for how the team designs, builds, and operates the platform, and lead deep, constructive reviews that grow the engineers around you.
Partner across teams: Operate peer-to-peer with tech leads in adjacent groups to review major architectural decisions and keep the wider platform aligned.