Staff Site Reliability Engineer
Okta · Posted Sep 30
Cloud-based identity and access management solutions for workforce and customer security
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About the role
Okta's Emerging Products Group (EPG) builds highly reliable, scalable, and secure cloud services, with an automation-first approach and continuous investment in platform engineering, observability, and operational excellence. This Staff Site Reliability Engineer role is a technical leadership position within the EPG SRE organization, partnering with software engineers, architects, and product teams to design, build, and operate world-class cloud services across Kubernetes, Terraform, Go, and Python. The engineer will drive reliability initiatives, incident response, and automation across distributed production systems.
What you will do
- Design, build, and operate large-scale cloud infrastructure and production services.
- Participate in an 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.
- Continuously improve observability through metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- Strong experience operating large-scale production services in AWS and/or GCP.
- Deep expertise with Kubernetes in production environments.
- Experience troubleshooting Kubernetes networking, storage, scheduling, scaling, and workload lifecycle issues.
- 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.
- Experience with observability platforms, monitoring strategies, and production telemetry.
- Experience with or strong interest in AI-assisted engineering and operational automation.
- Strong expertise operating customer-facing production systems.
- 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.
- Understanding of cloud security fundamentals, IAM, secrets management, and secure infrastructure design.
- Experience implementing operational controls and best practices in regulated or security-sensitive environments is a plus.
- 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.
- Experience mentoring engineers and elevating technical capabilities within an organization.
- Ability to influence technical direction through expertise, partnership, and execution.
Preferred qualifications
- 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.
Benefits and support
- Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting
About Okta
Okta is a leading independent provider of cloud-based identity and access management solutions that securely connect people and technologies to the right applications. The company powers both Workforce Identity and Customer Identity platforms, allowing organizations to securely manage user access and navigate modern challenges like agentic AI security.
- Industry
- Enterprise Software
- Company size
- 7500+ employees
- Founded
- 2009
- Location
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Funding
Public Company · $228M raised
- 2010-02-01Series A$10M
- 2011-08-01Series B$16.5M
- 2012-12-01Series C$25M
- 2013-09-01Series D$27M
- 2014-06-01Series E$75M
- 2015-09-01Series F$75M
- 2018-02-21Post IPO Debt$300M
Leadership
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Co-Founder and Executive Vice Chairman
Chief Marketing Officer
Chief Legal Officer
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