Staff Identity Governance and Access Engineer

Okta•Washington, DC

2d•$161,000 - $221,000•Onsite

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. The Identity Governance and Access Security Team: The Identity Governance and Access Security team runs Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), Privileged Access Management (PAM), and Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) for Okta itself — serving as Okta's "Customer Zero." The team owns the complete identity lifecycle for the workforce, from birthright provisioning through Workday to access certifications, privileged access management, and mover/leaver processes. What the team builds becomes the reference architecture that Okta customers deploy at scale. The Staff Identity Security Engineer Opportunity: We're looking for a Staff Identity Security Engineer to take deep technical ownership of our Okta Identity Governance (OIG), Okta Privileged Access (OPA), and ISPM implementations. This is a senior individual-contributor role where you'll set technical direction for how the team builds on top of these platforms and raise the bar for the engineering team through review, mentorship, and documentation. You should be equally comfortable in an architecture discussion, in a live Okta Workflows debugging session, and writing the design doc that a Jira epic gets broken down from. The ideal candidate is a self-starter who thrives in an autonomous environment and actively drives "what's next" for our identity security posture — identifying process bottlenecks, designing technical solutions, and pushing initiatives from concept to production without waiting for direction.

Requirements

Minimum 4+ years of direct, advanced experience managing and administering enterprise IGA, PAM/ISPM tools and platforms.
Demonstrated hands-on experience designing and deploying Birthright Provisioning models and RBAC architectures in production environments.
Production experience with OPA or equivalent PAM tooling, including Zero Standing Privilege, Just-In-Time access models, break-glass design, and admin tiering.
Production experience with ISPM tools (such as Okta ISPM) that integrate with EDR solutions like Crowdstrike Falcon.
Solid grounding in identity and access standards (SAML, OIDC, OAuth 2.0, SCIM) and role/attribute-based access control concepts.
Track record of owning technical designs for identity lifecycle problems (joiner/mover/leaver) end-to-end, from design doc through production rollout.
Experience operating in SOX and compliance-critical environments — understanding audit evidence requirements, segregation of duties, and access certification integrity.
Works independently and drives initiatives without waiting for direction, with the executive-ready communication skills to present updates, risks, and roadmaps to leadership.
U.S. soil status - the employee must be on U.S. soil, which means the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or outlying areas of the United States, as defined in Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 2.101, and be a U.S. person.
U.S. person status - the employee must be either a U.S. citizen as defined in 42 U.S. Code § 9102; a natural person who is a lawful permanent resident as defined in 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(20) or who is a protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3); or a U.S. national (i.e. includes citizens and non-citizens born in outlying possessions such as American Samoa and Swains Island), green card holders, refugees, and asylees. Working on a U.S. visa does NOT qualify as a U.S. person.

Nice To Haves

Experience governing non-human identities (service accounts, API tokens, secrets, AI agents/workload identities) and scaling access certification programs — including distinct ownership models, lifecycle states, and certification approaches
Familiarity with ServiceNow and JIRA-based service request intake for IGA/PAM/ISPM operations
Okta certifications — Okta Certified Administrator, Okta Certified Consultant, or Okta Workflows Specialist
Technical integration experience with REST APIs, JSON parsing, webhooks, and Workday-to-IdP patterns (real-time event delivery vs. scheduled reconciliation tradeoffs)
Experience supporting compliance audits across multiple frameworks beyond SOX (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR)

Responsibilities

Own OIG architecture end-to-end — design access request workflows, entitlement/Resource Collections structures, and certification campaigns that reduce reviewer fatigue and rubber-stamping.
Lead lifecycle, birthright, and RBAC strategy — design and deploy automated birthright access rules, RBAC frameworks, and seamless joiner/mover/leaver (JML) processes across the enterprise.
Drive Workday integration architecture — balance scheduled reconciliation (attribute accuracy) with Real-Time Sync (immediate termination), and define the attribute sets that access rules depend on.
Design and harden mover/leaver automation — implement attribute-driven group re-evaluation on role changes, safe decommissioning of stale access, and close gaps between automated joiner flows and historically manual processes.
Lead OPA, ISPM, and Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP) initiatives — design privileged session access, Just-In-Time (JIT) elevation, break-glass emergency access, identity security vulnerability detection, and tiering models for Tier 0/Tier 1 systems.
Own PAM and ISPM telemetry and KPIs — establish and track metrics around standing-privilege reduction, JIT adoption, stale access cleanup, and break-glass test success as ongoing operational measures.
Build and maintain Okta Workflows automation — streamline access requests, approvals, and remediation across IGA and PAM processes using the Okta Workflows engine.
Mentor engineers, review designs, and communicate with leadership — be the technical escalation point for the team's hardest problems, help junior engineers grow, and present clear updates, risk assessments, and roadmaps to executive stakeholders.