Staff Identity Engineer

The Identity Team

Oktas internal Identity team secures the foundational trust layer for our modern enterprise. As organizations adopt phishing-resistant MFA attackers have shifted toward session hijacking and cookie theft. Furthermore with the rise of autonomous AI workloads we are extending our platform to protect and govern a growing sprawl of non-human agentic workflows. Our mission is to ensure every person and machine can safely connect to the right technology at the right time.

The Staff Identity Engineer Opportunity

As a Staff Engineer at Okta you will be a technical authority within our internal IAM team driving the architecture and execution of our identity fabric. You will champion our Customer Zero philosophy partnering with product engineering to deploy Oktas newest features internally before they reach global markets. This role requires a technical leader who acts with ownership and urgency turning action into traction and ruthlessly simplifying complex problems. You will serve as a mentor influence architectural decisions and help determine the future of the platform.

What youll be doing

• Drive Customer Zero Execution: Act as a key technical bridge between internal stakeholders the Okta on Okta team and core Product teams. Lead the early adoption of cutting-edge internal capabilities providing rigorous technical feedback to mature products before global release.
• Architecture & Hands-On Implementation: Own the lifecycle policy design adaptive MFA and federation (SAML OIDC) for enterprise Okta tenants. Architect and enforce cloud IAM guardrails across AWS GCP and Azure building API-based pipelines to automate complex workflows.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Serve as a core technical anchor for the engineering team. Mentor engineers act as a primary review authority for IAM designs and set technical standards across the organization.
• Operational & Security Governance: Drive automation-first initiatives to eliminate systemic inefficiencies. Partner directly with Security Audit and Compliance teams to ensure identity controls natively meet audit requirements (SOC 2 ISO 27001 FedRAMP).
• AI Security Integration: Drive the secure adoption of AI technologies by governing AI agents machine identities and service-to-service authentication within the enterprise identity layer.
• Cross-Functional Partnering & Metrics: Collaborate with cross-functional partners to advance identity security establish operational KPIs and translate complex technical milestones into actionable leadership updates.

What youll bring to the role

To be successful in this role you should have deep hands-on architectural experience across the modern identity and cloud infrastructure lifecycle. We are looking for a practitioner who understands both theory and real-world implementation.

• Domain Experience: 4 years of hands-on experience designing implementing and maintaining enterprise-scale IAM solutions.
• Okta Platform Mastery: Deep expertise in managing complex enterprise Okta environments including hands-on proficiency with Okta Identity Engine (OIE) Directory Integrations Advanced Policies Workflows and Platform APIs.
• Core Identity Protocols: Advanced expertise in modern authentication and authorization standards (OIDC OAuth 2.0 SAML 2.0) and phishing-resistant MFA paradigms (FIDO2/WebAuthn Passkeys).
• Cloud & Infrastructure as Code: Proven experience defining identity controls as code using Terraform and Okta Workflows. Practical experience designing cloud IAM guardrails across multi-cloud environments (AWS GCP Azure) and M2M/service-to-service authentication.
• Session & Zero Trust Security: Solid background in session lifecycle security token management/revocation strategies and continuous access evaluations (CAEP/eSSO) to mitigate session hijacking.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers driving design reviews and establishing engineering best practices across teams.
• Compliance & Automation Mindset: Strong orientation toward automation-first design with practical experience building identity controls that align with enterprise frameworks (SOC 2 ISO 27001 FedRAMP).
• Travel: Occasional travel required as needed.

Additional requirements:

• 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.

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