The TeamWe are looking for an experienced Staff Site Reliability Engineer to join Okta's Emerging Products Group (EPG). Our mission is to build highly reliable, scalable, and secure cloud services that our customers can trust. We embrace an automation-first mindset and continuously invest in platform engineering, observability, and operational excellence to enable our engineering teams to move quickly and safely.
This role is ideal for a seasoned engineer who thrives on solving ambiguous, cross-team technical challenges. You will serve as a key technical lead within the EPG SRE organization, partnering with software engineers and product teams to improve our systems. Specifically, you will identify systemic bottlenecks, help shape the reliability roadmap for our group, and ensure our technical approach aligns with team and organizational reliability goals.
The ideal candidate exemplifies the philosophy of "if you have to do it more than once, automate it" and possesses a strong passion for continuous improvement, operational excellence, and software engineering.
What you'll be doing Reliability & Operations- Design, build, and operate large-scale cloud infrastructure and production services.
- Participate in a global on-call rotation supporting highly available customer-facing systems.
- Lead incident response efforts and drive post-incident reviews focused on systemic improvements.
- Define, measure, and improve Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budgets.
- Partner with engineering teams to improve service availability, scalability, performance, and resilience.
- Ensure all infrastructure and operational practices adhere to strict FedRAMP compliance and security mandates, maintaining continuous audit readiness.
- Continuously improve observability through metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting.
Engineering & Automation- Develop software, automation, and infrastructure using Go, Python, Terraform, and related technologies.
- Eliminate operational toil through automation, tooling, and platform engineering.
- Improve deployment safety and operational workflows through CI/CD and GitOps practices.
- Collaborate on modernizing existing workloads and aligning them with evolving platform capabilities.
- Build self-service platforms, operational guardrails, and automation that improve developer velocity while maintaining reliability and security.
Technical Leadership- Lead complex reliability initiatives spanning multiple engineering teams.
- Guide engineers in adopting operational best practices and reliability engineering principles.
- Mentor engineers through technical collaboration, design reviews, incident analysis, and knowledge sharing.
- Influence architecture and operational decisions through data-driven recommendations and engineering expertise.
- Drive projects from conception through production rollout and long-term operational ownership.
Innovation- Explore and apply AI-assisted engineering techniques to improve operational efficiency, incident response, troubleshooting, and automation.
- Identify opportunities to leverage emerging technologies to reduce toil and improve engineering productivity.
Our Tech Stack- Infrastructure/Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS/GKE), Terraform, Helm, Git, ArgoCD, GitOps
- Programming: Golang, Python, Rust
- Observability: Datadog, Splunk, Graphana
- Data Stores: PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch, Snowflake
What you'll bring to the roleTechnical Excellence- Extensive experience architecting and leading the evolution of large-scale production services in AWS and/or GCP.
- Deep expertise in defining Kubernetes patterns and Linux-based system standards for enterprise-grade production environments.
- Experience designing multi-region, highly available cloud architectures from the ground up.
- Experience troubleshooting Kubernetes networking, storage, scheduling, scaling, and workload lifecycle issues.
- Proven track record of evaluating "build vs. buy" decisions and setting long-term technical standards for an organization.
- Extensive experience with Infrastructure as Code technologies such as Terraform and Helm.
- Strong software engineering skills in Golang and/or Python.
- Experience building automation and internal engineering platforms.
- Experience operating and troubleshooting distributed data platforms such as PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch, MySQL, Cassandra, or similar technologies.
- Strong understanding of cloud networking fundamentals including DNS, load balancing, ingress, TLS, service networking, and traffic management.
- Strategic experience designing comprehensive observability frameworks and telemetry-driven operational strategies.
- Experience with or strong interest in AI-assisted engineering and operational automation.
Operational Excellence- Strong expertise operating customer-facing production systems subject to SLA
- Experience leading incident response and driving operational improvements.
- Deep understanding of reliability engineering concepts including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and capacity planning.
- Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, and automation-first operational practices.
- Proven ability to balance reliability, scalability, security, and engineering velocity.
Security & Compliance- Understanding of cloud security fundamentals, IAM, secrets management, and secure infrastructure design.
- Experience implementing operational controls, compliance standards (e.g., FedRAMP, SOC2, HIPAA), and best practices in highly regulated or security-sensitive government cloud environments is highly preferred.
Leadership- Demonstrated success leading complex engineering initiatives across multiple teams.
- Strong collaboration and communication skills.
- Experience working effectively within globally distributed engineering organizations spanning multiple timezones and cultures.
- Act as a technical force-multiplier, defining engineering standards, raising the technical bar across the EPG organization, and sponsoring the growth of junior engineers.
- Ability to influence technical direction through expertise, partnership, and execution.
And extra credit if you have experience in any of the following! - Experience operating SaaS platforms serving large-scale customer workloads.
- Experience working within Kubernetes-based microservices environments.
- Experience supporting globally distributed production environments.
- Experience with GitOps and ArgoCD.
- Experience implementing AI-assisted operational tooling or automation workflows.
Federal Eligibility Requirements:- This role supports US FedRAMP projects and requires the employee to be a US Person (US Citizen or Green Card Holder) to meet FedRAMP compliance and security clearance standards.There is no citizenship requirement. The Okta employee must be on US 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
#LI-SM1
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The annual base salary range for this position for candidates located in the San Francisco Bay area is between:
$194,000-$267,000 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:
$174,000-$239,000 USD
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