Staff Backend Engineer - Okta Identity Governance

Okta secures identity for organizations worldwide, building trusted, neutral infrastructure that enables enterprise teams to safely embrace new technologies and AI capabilities.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Okta Identity Governance (OIG) team, you will take end-to-end technical ownership of key architecture and feature areas within Okta’s flagship governance platform. In this high-impact backend role, you will design, build, and scale microservices and event-driven systems that manage access governance, entitlement workflows, and compliance auditing for thousands of global enterprise customers. You will partner closely with Product, QA, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to deliver secure, scalable, and resilient software used by millions of daily users.

Key Responsibilities

• End-to-End Technical Ownership: Lead feature areas across the OIG platform from initial technical design through implementation, testing, deployment, and post-launch operational monitoring.
• Distributed Architecture & Systems Design: Architect and ship production-ready, event-driven microservices, REST/gRPC APIs, and scalable data models with a focus on high availability, performance, and correctness.
• Engineering Quality & Standards: Write clean, well-tested, maintainable code in Java, Kotlin, or Go, holding the broader engineering team to high standards of craftsmanship and code quality.
• Cross-Functional Scoping: Partner with Product Managers, QA Engineers, and SREs to scope development tasks, mitigate technical risks, and manage production deployment pipelines.
• Technical Alignment & Influence: Drive technical consensus and architectural direction across multiple engineering teams and stakeholders without needing formal reporting authority.
• Customer Issue Resolution: Quickly diagnose and resolve complex customer-reported issues, bug reports, and performance bottlenecks in production environments.

Requirements

Experience & Technical Depth

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of independently owning and shipping complex features in enterprise production environments.
• Demonstrated experience architecting and operating large-scale, fault-tolerant distributed systems and microservices.
• Strong backend programming proficiency in one or more core cloud-native/JVM languages: Java, Kotlin, or Go.
• Expertise in event-driven architecture, API design, high-concurrency processing, and large-scale data modeling.
• Direct experience designing systems that meet strict enterprise security and reliability requirements (multi-tenancy, high availability, audit logging, RBAC/ABAC).

Education & Compliance

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• U.S. Soil Requirement: Must perform all work physically located on U.S. soil (50 states, District of Columbia, or outlying areas of the U.S. per FAR 2.101). No citizenship restriction applies.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct domain experience building Identity and Access Management (IAM) or Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platforms.
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration engines, approval routing systems, finite state machines, or BPM engines.
• Hands-on experience developing enterprise multi-tenant SaaS platforms on cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Depth with modern observability, telemetry, and distributed tracing tooling.

Total Rewards & Benefits

• Compensation & Equity: Market-based base salary + corporate equity grants + annual performance bonus eligibility.
• Health & Wellness: Comprehensive healthcare coverage (medical, dental, vision, FSA/HSA options) and well-being programs.
• Financial & Retirement: 401(k) program with company match and financial planning support.
• Time Off & Parental Leave: Generous paid time off (PTO), paid parental leave, and corporate social impact volunteer days.