The Principal Data Engineer Opportunity

Okta's Data Engineering team is on a mission to accelerate Okta's scale and growth by building platforms that are utilized across the organization. With the growth of AI in our Products and our business, Okta's data is more critical to our success than ever. As a Principal Data Engineer on the Data and Insights team, you will be a key technical leader responsible for architecting, building, and maintaining our most critical and scalable data solutions.

This role will work closely with our Product Engineering teams to ensure that valuable user behavior on our products is captured in an efficient and scalable manner, unlocking insights that will drive adoption and growth. This involves leading projects and collaborating closely with product engineers, analytic engineers, data analysts and data scientists to ensure data availability and integrity.

As a Principal member of the team you will have a proven ability to tie engineering initiatives to product and business impact. You will also demonstrate a strong sense of judgement, and the ability to influence across the organization.

What you'll be doing

• Design, build and evolve high scale data solutions that serve as the reference architecture for the organization and simplifying data access across the organization
• Develop data quality frameworks, monitoring, anomaly detection, and alerting, with governance, lineage tracking, and change management rigor appropriate for externally reported numbers
• Drive adoption of consistent data modeling patterns, naming conventions, documentation norms, and metric governance standards across the data organization
• Lead cross-functional technical initiatives across data verticals to accelerate delivery and harden data systems
• Navigate ambiguity and make sound technical decisions, balancing short-term delivery with long-term infrastructure investment
• Champion Data Contracts: implement data contracts and schema evolution practices to ensure reliability across global product teams
• Mentor and Scale: Raise the technical bar by mentoring senior engineers, leading cross functional task forces, and fostering a culture of engineering excellence and data driven decision making
• Stay at the forefront of the data landscape, adopting and advocating for emerging technologies and practices to guide the team's long-term technical direction

What you'll bring to the role

• Experience: 10+ years in a data engineering role, with proven experience in a senior or lead capacity. Experience with Federal government compliance and security requirements is highly desirable.
• Product knowledge: Deep expertise in product behavioral data engineering - specifically in telemetry data, including structured data for product launch analysis, feature usage, retention and other critical product lifecycle metrics.
• Proven experience working closely with Product Engineering teams to partner on successful instrumentation for data collection.
• Technical Expertise: Expert-level experience with SQL, ETL/ELT tools (Airflow, dbt), and MPP databases (Snowflake, Redshift). Extensive hands-on experience with AWS services (S3, Lambda, EMR, ECR, EKS).
• Modern Architectures: Deep experience designing and working with lakehouse architectures (Databricks) and modern file formats (Iceberg, Delta).

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The annual base salary range for this position for candidates located in the San Francisco Bay area is between:

$197,000-$270,600 USD

Below is the annual base salary range for candidates located in California (excluding San Francisco Bay Area), Colorado, Illinois, New York and Washington. Your actual base salary will depend on factors such as your skills, qualifications, experience, and work location. In addition, Okta offers equity (where applicable), bonus, and benefits, including health, dental and vision insurance, 401(k), flexible spending account, and paid leave (including PTO and parental leave) in accordance with our applicable plans and policies. To learn more about our Total Rewards program please visit: https://rewards.okta.com/us.

The annual base salary range for this position for candidates located in California (excluding San Francisco Bay Area), Colorado, Illinois, New York, and Washington is between:

$176,000-$242,000 USD

The Okta Experience

• Supporting Your Well-Being
• Driving Social Impact
• Developing Talent and Fostering Connection + Community

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.