Product Design Architect

Okta•Chicago, WA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Secure Every Identity, from AI to Human Identity is the key to unlocking the potential of AI. Okta secures AI by building the trusted, neutral infrastructure that enables organizations to safely embrace this new era. This work requires a relentless drive to solve complex challenges with real-world stakes. We are looking for builders and owners who operate with speed and urgency and execute with excellence. This is an opportunity to do career-defining work. We're all in on this mission. If you are too, let's talk. Overview At Okta, we're building a world where anyone can safely use any technology, and, within Okta Platform R&D, we're specifically focused on protecting the future of work. We bring simple and secure access to people and organizations everywhere, promising to not only protect the identities of our customers' workforce and users, but to ask, "what more can we make possible?" As a Product Design Architect, you are the lead designer for the entire Okta platform. You ensure that all our products work together as one cohesive, simple, and secure experience. You will define the design vision, set company-wide standards, and influence high-level strategy alongside executive leadership. Where Principal Product Designers own the UX strategy within product and portfolio areas, you'll own the design architecture that connects them at the Okta-wide level, setting the innovation agenda, establishing standards across portfolios, and ensuring that Okta's products define what great identity experiences look like, both inside our walls and in the industry. This role sits at the intersection of design craft and strategic leadership. You'll work across R&D organizations, partnering with product and engineering leadership to make decisions that have broad, lasting impact on how millions of users navigate, understand, use, and trust Okta's products. Finer print This role shapes the highest-order design strategy across Okta's full product portfolio. You will lead company-wide discovery efforts and work hand-in-hand with product leadership and executive teams to translate business ambitions into compelling, human-centered product visions. You will establish best practices and raise design fluency across the entire Research & Development organization. You will help refine the structural design decisions that product teams build within: the platform-level IA, cross-product navigation models, shared interaction paradigms, and the design governance processes that ensure those standards hold over time. You'll do this through a combination of deep craft work (architecture maps, journeys and user flows, design standards), strategic facilitation (cross-org alignment, design reviews), and active mentorship of the senior and principal designers who look to you for direction. You won't be embedded in a single product area, you'll be the connective tissue across all of them.

Requirements

Degree in a related field or relevant work experience as a Product Designer
15+ years of experience as a Product Designer, with a significant portion of that time operating at a senior or principal level across large, complex product portfolios
Demonstrated proficiency in leveraging AI-powered design tools and plugins within your workflow
Proficient in Claude Code, Figma, Miro, and/or similar design and facilitation tools
Possess at least a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS/JavaScript/React

Nice To Haves

Industry expert with experience designing for enterprise scale and identity security.
AI-first mindset, demonstrated by practical experience using various AI tools in your daily design workflows.
Company-wide, systems-level perspective; you see across the entire product portfolio and identify the connective tissue that makes Okta's suite coherent and powerful.
Strategic thought partner to product leadership and executive teams, who seek your perspective on hard problems and trust your judgment on design direction.
Proven ability to lead and facilitate design thinking at the executive level, translating abstract business goals into actionable, human-centered design strategies.
Create new organizational and operational standards that outlast any individual deliverable.
Effective external voice for Okta Design: you can represent Okta at a conference, contribute a byline, or appear on a podcast and make the design community want to work here.
Exceptional communication skills and can distill the most complex concepts into clear, inspiring narratives for any audience, from an individual contributor to the C-suite.
Share our values, and work in accordance with those values.

Responsibilities

Communicate inspiring, forward-looking visions of the future for Okta and our customers that energize teams and attract talent
Drive company-wide efforts that improve our ability to scale design solutions for the largest and most complex global customers
Facilitate strategic sessions with senior leadership and executive teams and serve as an advocate for our customers at the most senior levels
Influence company strategy and help define Okta's position in the market by contributing design perspective to the highest-level product and business conversations
Set an example for how we best use AI across to ship high quality designs and evangelize those approaches across Engineering, Product, and Design.
Enable execution across the company by aligning teams around company-level goals and design standards
Collaborate with senior leadership to define the future of AI at Okta
Actively work to uplevel design fluency across the entire company, not just the Product Design team, so that more of Okta thinks and builds with design quality as a baseline
Mentor designers at any level; be a standard-bearer for Okta's core values and for industry best practices
Be an early adopter of new methods in design, including AI-assisted workflows. Form an opinion about evolving design methods and practices, and help the organization adopt those new methods
Stay deeply attuned to competitor products, UX trends, and emerging technology, and bring those insights into the organization in ways that create competitive advantage