Staff Backend Engineer

Okta•Toronto, ON

11d•Hybrid

About The Position

Okta is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join the Privileged Access Management (PAM) team. Okta's mission is to secure every identity, from AI to human, by building trusted, neutral infrastructure that enables organizations to safely embrace the new era of AI. The PAM team focuses on an identity-centric approach to privileged access, utilizing a Zero Trust architecture for modern cloud environments to solve security and operations challenges at scale. This role involves building infrastructure that controls access to sensitive servers, databases, and cloud resources, granting access only when needed, acting as a security layer between users and systems. The ideal candidate is a Backend Software Engineer who thrives on solving complex problems related to distributed systems, where precision and reliability are paramount. This position offers the opportunity to ship code that protects real infrastructure for organizations, build foundational components for multiple feature teams, and make significant impacts on product speed, reliability, and usability. The role requires a systems-thinking approach, strong opinions on good abstractions, and the flexibility to adapt those abstractions as the product evolves.

Requirements

8+ years of experience as a SWE
Are an experienced software engineer with a background in Golang (other languages are also acceptable)
Experienced working with relational databases like PostgreSQL or similar RDBMS technologies
Have the ability to design database models and backend APIs
Have experience working with cloud services like Caching, Queues, NoSQL Databases etc.
Experienced working with any cloud provider such as AWS, GCP or Azure
Thrive in a collaborative environment built on end-to-end ownership
Love thinking about distributed systems, and the reliability, availability, and performance implications of the decisions made in their design
Enjoy deep-diving into production metrics, and familiarity with monitoring tools like Splunk, DataDog etc.
Think in terms of systems, services, and APIs

Responsibilities

Be deeply involved in evolving the core architecture of PAM
Work in our product development teams to build scalable, composable components of our platform
Be responsible for designing and implementing scalable architecture patterns
Design and build APIs with OpenAPI Specification that customers rely on for access to production infrastructure
Work on backend systems written in Go
Participate in the rotational on-call activities with SRE and product development teams