Senior Architect, Emerging Technologies (Auth0)

Okta • Chicago, IL

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

Okta is The World’s Identity Company. We free everyone to safely use any technology, anywhere, on any device or app. Our flexible and neutral products, Okta Platform and Auth0 Platform, provide secure access, authentication, and automation, placing identity at the core of business security and growth.

At Okta, we celebrate a variety of perspectives and experiences. We are not looking for someone who checks every single box - we’re looking for lifelong learners and people who can make us better with their unique experiences.

Join our team! We’re building a world where Identity belongs to you.
We are looking for a Senior Architect to join our Emerging Technologies organization. This is a high-leverage, hands-on engineering role designed for a technical leader who wants to stay in the code while steering the architectural direction of our most ambitious bets.
You will be a core contributor and architectural anchor for two high-priority workstreams:
Fine-Grained Authorization (FGA) | Scaling 1 to 10
To build a world-class, low-latency FGA system that remains resilient under the industry’s most complex identity hierarchies. We are looking for an architect who views authorization not as a set of rules, but as a massive-scale graph computation problem that requires elegant, distributed, and mathematically rigorous solutions.
The Work:
Algorithmic Innovation: Moving beyond naive graph algorithms to implement probabilistic structures and fixpoint algorithms capable of navigating massive organizational hierarchies without computational or memory exhaustion.
Graph Resolution Heuristics: Engineering workload-aware heuristics that can intelligently prioritize and resolve graph queries based on complexity cost, maintaining low latency even when faced with high-cardinality data sets and deep nesting.
Fixpoint & Cycle Resolution: Solving for complex resolution requirements, such as circular references and recursive paths, in a horizontally scaled environment where traditional distributed patterns fail to meet our performance mandates.
Scaling the Probabilistic Logic: Designing the engine to utilize non-deterministic approaches where exact computation is too expensive, ensuring the system remains mathematically rigorous while operating at the limits of global scale.
AI Products | 0 to 1
We are pioneering the "Agentic Identity" space. This workstream is focused on building foundational products that secure AI Agents and provide developers with the tools to manage identity in an autonomous world.
The Work: Rapidly architecting and shipping 0-to-1 product offerings that define how agents interact securely.
The Goal: Establish our platform as the standard for securing the next generation of AI-driven applications.

Requirements

• Senior Architect-Level Technical Depth: Extensive experience as a Senior Architect or Distinguished Engineer with a history of shipping complex, large-scale systems.
• Hands-on Practitioner: You still love coding. You prefer to prove an architectural concept with a PR rather than a slide deck.
• Domain Expertise: Strong background in Authorization/Identity and a mastery of Graph Algorithms.
• Adaptability: Comfortable shifting between the rigors of scaling a "1-to-10" product and the ambiguity of a "0-to-1" AI initiative.

Responsibilities

• Architectural Acceleration: Don’t just design it, build it. You will accelerate teams by writing critical-path code and providing the architectural "connective tissue" between complex systems.
• Algorithmic Leadership: Apply deep expertise in graph theory and distributed systems to solve the unique scaling challenges of our FGA domain.
• Technical Strategy: Partner with product leadership to define the technical roadmap for securing AI agents, ensuring our 0-to-1 bets are built on a sustainable foundation.
• High-Bar Engineering: Set the standard for code quality, system design, and engineering excellence across the Emerging Tech group.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees