Staff Software Engineer
Okta
Staff Software Engineer
Okta
Secures digital identities for people and software
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.
Staff Software Engineer - Full Stack
Position Description:
We are seeking an experienced Staff Engineer to provide technical leadership for the Advanced Integration Builder team within Okta. This team builds and maintains the backend services, provisioning frameworks, authentication connectors, and next-generation Entitlement Management engines that let Okta customers secure, integrate, and govern access to thousands of third-party enterprise applications — from modern cloud platforms (Microsoft Office 365, Workday, Salesforce, AWS, ServiceNow) and AI agentic systems to legacy on-prem systems . As a Staff Engineer, you will set technical direction across multiple integrations and the shared frameworks they depend on, resolve the hardest cross-app reliability and architecture problems — rate limiting at scale, backward compatibility — and raise the engineering bar for the team. This is a backend-intensive role centered on distributed systems, API client architecture, and operational excellence at scale. Day-to-day frontend involvement is still light relative to backend work, but you'll need decent React and JSP experience to guide and occasionally hand-build the new feature requests.
Job Duties and Responsibilities:
- Technical Leadership: Independently drive the design and execution of complex, ambiguous initiatives spanning multiple app integrations or shared frameworks used across dozens of connectors.
- Architecture & Design: Lead technical design discussions for new integration patterns and shared abstractions; identify opportunities to consolidate duplicated per-app logic (REST/SOAP clients, exception handling, OAuth utilities) into reusable frameworks, reducing long-term maintenance burden across the integration portfolio.
- Scale & Reliability: Solve systemic reliability problems — rate-limit handling, pagination/throttling abstractions, multi-tenant and compliance-variant support — that affect many integrations simultaneously, not just a single app.
- Operational Excellence: Act as a guardian-level responder for integration-pipeline incidents; drive root-cause analysis and remediation for systemic issues; lead operational improvement projects (observability, alerting, on-call runbooks) across the team's full integration portfolio.
- Technical Risk Management: Identify and mitigate technical risk in the team's roadmap — vendor API deprecations, backward-compatibility obligations across dozens of live integrations, and legacy protocol support .
- Cross-Functional Ownership: Partner with PMs, support, security, and other engineering teams to prioritize, influence product direction for the integration catalog, and own outcomes beyond code — including research and recommendations on build-vs-buy or deprecation decisions.
- Code Quality & Technical Standards: Set the bar for code review, testing rigor (unit, API/mock-server, and nightly functional tests against third-party endpoints), and documentation across the team.
- Mentorship & Team Growth: Mentor engineers at all levels, unblock teammates on complex integration and distributed-systems problems, and contribute meaningfully to hiring and interview loops.
- Engineering Culture: Champion engineering best practices internally
Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:
- Experience: 8+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and operating reliable, production-grade backend systems at scale.
- Backend Expertise: Deep proficiency in Java and Spring Boot; demonstrated ability to design systems or shared libraries consumed by multiple teams.
- Distributed Systems at Scale: Deep experience with asynchronous job processing, event-driven architectures, and designing resilient systems (retry/backoff, rate limiting, circuit breakers) that tolerate dozens of heterogeneous, unreliable third-party dependencies.
- Data Management: Strong command of relational databases (MySQL) and caching strategies (Redis or similar) at scale.
- API & Framework Design: Experience designing shared libraries/frameworks consumed by multiple teams (e.g., provisioning adapters, client-session abstractions) — not just single-service APIs.
- Operational Leadership: Track record of driving incident response, RCAs, and systemic reliability improvements for production systems with many integration points.
- Problem Solving & Ownership: Comfortable owning ambiguous, cross-cutting technical problems and driving them to resolution with minimal supervision.
- Decent Frontend Experience: While the role is backend-dominant, you should be comfortable building and modifying UI in React and JSP well enough to review/guide frontend changes and step in to build features
Nice to Haves:
- Deep experience with identity/IAM standards (SCIM, SAML, OAuth, OIDC) or directory services (AD, LDAP) across many simultaneous integrations.
- Integration & Auth Protocols: Strong working knowledge of REST/SOAP integration patterns and authentication/federation standards (OAuth2, SAML, WS-Federation), including supporting legacy protocols alongside modern ones.
- Experience designing multi-tenant SaaS architectures and/or specialized compliance environments (FedRAMP/GCC-High).
- Experience with message brokers/queueing systems (Kafka) for large-scale asynchronous processing.
- A track record of leading architectural consolidation efforts (reducing duplicated per-integration code into shared frameworks).
Education:
B.E./M.S. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
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The Okta Experience
We are intentional about connection. Our global community, spanning over 20 offices worldwide, is united by a drive to innovate. Your journey begins with an immersive, in-person onboarding experience designed to accelerate your impact and connect you to our mission and team from day one.
Okta is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, or status as a protected veteran. We also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and convictions records, consistent with applicable laws.
If reasonable accommodation is needed to complete any part of the job application, interview process, or onboarding please use this Form to request an accommodation.
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Okta builds cloud identity software that controls how employees, customers, and automated systems access applications and company resources. Its single sign-on product lets people use one login across their work tools, while passwordless sign-in and additional identity checks protect accounts from stolen credentials. Administrators use its directory, access policies, and lifecycle tools to grant permissions when someone joins an organization and remove them when they leave. Organizations pay subscriptions based on the products they use and the identities they manage, with support included. Okta was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States.
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