Serving as a technical leader for reliability engineering within Okta's Emerging Products Group (EPG) is the core of this role, which extends beyond operating production systems. You will define technical strategy, influence platform architecture, establish reliability standards, and lead transformational initiatives that improve scalability, resilience, security, and operational excellence for one of Okta's fastest-growing product areas. This role suits a candidate with deep technical expertise, strong organizational influence, and a proven track record of leading large-scale engineering initiatives that drive measurable business outcomes.
Responsibilities
Define and drive the reliability strategy for critical product and platform services
Establish standards for availability, resilience, observability, incident management, and operational readiness
Lead architecture reviews for critical services and platform initiatives
Partner with engineering leaders to ensure reliability objectives align with business priorities and customer expectations
Create frameworks, standards, and operational guardrails that enable engineering teams to operate safely at scale
Guide service architecture toward simplicity, scalability, resilience, and operational excellence
Drive major initiatives that improve platform maturity and long-term sustainability
Own reliability architecture and operational excellence for the Spera / ISPM product area
Collaborate closely with engineering leadership to establish reliability objectives and technical roadmaps
Lead large-scale scalability, resiliency, and performance initiatives
Partner with platform and product engineering teams to build self-service operational capabilities that improve developer productivity while strengthening reliability and security
Influence technical direction through data-driven recommendations, engineering expertise, and collaborative leadership
Support highly available, large-scale cloud environments as part of an on-call rotation
Design, build, and operate large-scale cloud infrastructure and production services
Develop software, automation, and infrastructure using Go, Python, Terraform, and related technologies
Eliminate operational toil through automation, tooling, and platform engineering
Improve deployment safety, operational workflows, and platform consistency through GitOps and Infrastructure-as-Code practices
Collaborate on modernizing existing workloads and aligning them with evolving platform capabilities
Lead complex engineering initiatives from conception through production rollout and long-term operational ownership
Mentor Staff and Senior engineers across multiple teams and organizations
Millions of jobs, with real people getting hired every day
200,000+
New jobs added daily
7,000,000+
Verified job listings
1,000,000+
Tailored applications submitted
Lead technical reviews, design reviews, and operational readiness assessments
Build engineering consensus across teams with differing priorities and objectives
Help develop the next generation of technical leaders within Okta
Drive adoption of reliability engineering best practices across EPG
Share patterns, tooling, and operational practices across Workflows, Inbox, PAM, and ISPM teams
Influence technical direction through expertise, collaboration, and execution rather than organizational authority
Lead the exploration and adoption of AI-assisted reliability engineering practices across EPG
Design and champion agentic systems that accelerate troubleshooting, incident response, root-cause analysis, and operational decision-making
Evaluate emerging AI technologies and identify practical opportunities to improve reliability engineering workflows
Establish best practices for safe, effective, and measurable use of AI within production operations
Drive initiatives that reduce operational toil and improve engineering productivity through intelligent automation
Requirements
Extensive experience designing and operating large-scale production systems in AWS and/or GCP
Deep expertise with Kubernetes in production environments
Experience designing reliability strategies for Kubernetes-based platforms
Extensive experience with Infrastructure as Code technologies such as Terraform and Helm
Strong software engineering skills in Golang and/or Python
Experience building internal platforms, developer tooling, and operational automation
Deep understanding of distributed systems architecture and cloud-native application design
Strong understanding of cloud networking fundamentals including DNS, service discovery, ingress, load balancing, TLS, traffic management, and multi-region architectures
Experience operating and troubleshooting distributed data platforms such as PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch, MySQL, Cassandra, or similar technologies
Experience establishing observability standards, monitoring strategies, and operational best practices across engineering organizations
Experience with or strong interest in AI-assisted engineering and operational automation
Strong expertise operating customer-facing production systems at scale
Deep understanding of reliability engineering principles including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, and resilience engineering
Experience leading major incident response efforts and driving long-term operational improvements
Strong understanding of CI/CD, GitOps, deployment strategies, and automation-first operational practices
Proven success driving large-scale reliability transformations and architectural modernization efforts
Ability to balance reliability, scalability, security, customer experience, and engineering velocity
Strong understanding of cloud security fundamentals, IAM, secrets management, and secure infrastructure design
Familiarity with operational controls, compliance requirements, and security best practices in cloud-native environments
Demonstrated success leading complex technical initiatives across multiple teams and organizations
Demonstrated ability to drive technical strategy and influence engineering outcomes across multiple organizations and leadership teams
Proven ability to influence technical direction without direct organizational authority
Experience working effectively within globally distributed engineering organizations spanning multiple timezones and cultures
Strong collaboration, communication, and stakeholder management skills
Experience mentoring Staff engineers and helping develop future technical leaders
Ability to translate business objectives into technical strategy and measurable reliability outcomes
Experience working closely with engineering leadership, architects, and product leaders to drive organizational change
Nice to have:
Experience operating SaaS platforms serving millions of users
Experience supporting globally distributed production environments
Experience leading platform engineering or reliability transformation initiatives
Prior experience as a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior technical leader in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Cloud Operations
Okta is seeking a Principal Site Reliability Engineer to serve as a technical leader for reliability engineering within its Emerging Products Group (EPG). Initially, you will partner closely with the Spera / Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) engineering organization. Over time, you will help drive broader reliability initiatives across EPG and contribute to the evolution of reliability engineering practices across multiple products including Workflows, IGA, PAM, and ISPM.
