Staff Backend Engineer, Non Human Identities

Okta•San Francisco, CA

5h•$194,000 - $267,300•Hybrid

About The Position

Okta is building trusted, neutral infrastructure to secure AI by enabling organizations to safely embrace this new era. This mission requires solving complex challenges with urgency and excellence. The Okta Privileged Access Management (PAM) team focuses on controlling access to critical systems like sensitive servers, databases, and cloud resources, granting access only when needed. This security layer operates between human and non-human identities and the systems they require. This opportunity is for a world-class Staff Engineer to architect and build the high-performance core of Okta's non-human identity platform. The role involves close collaboration with principal engineers and architects to lay the foundation for managing privileged access in modern enterprises, ideal for a systems programmer who thrives on influencing the design of high-performance, concurrent, and resilient security software.

Requirements

8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a heavy focus on backend or systems-level development
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience
Deep, hands-on expertise in multi-platform Go development and building high-performance, concurrent applications
Experience designing or operating distributed systems
Experience with secure systems (authn/authz, encryption, TLS, token handling, PKI, CAs, diagnosing TLS issues)
Deep expertise in distributed storage systems, with a focus on replication, backup, and restore, and data management. (Postgres, etc.)
Direct experience designing, building, or contributing to a secrets management, service mesh, or machine identity platform
Expert-level at ergonomic API design (gRPC/openAPI), and building for reliability at scale
Deep knowledge of cloud-native infrastructure

Nice To Haves

Experience at a leading Cybersecurity or Infrastructure-as-Code company
Contributions to open-source projects in the identity, security, or infrastructure space

Responsibilities

Contribute to Core Architecture: Partner with principal engineers and architects to design and implement a low-latency, high-throughput secrets engine for non-human identities
Solve for Massive Scale: Write highly concurrent, performance-critical code capable of handling millions of machine-to-machine authentication and authorization requests
Shape Technical Strategy: Play a key role in defining the long-term technical roadmap for scalability and performance, ensuring our platform can meet the demands of the largest enterprises
Mentor and Elevate: As a senior engineer on the team, you will work with junior engineers to help them advance their SDLC expertise.
On-Call: Participate in the rotational on-call activities with SRE and product development team