Principal Identity Engineer

The Identity Team

The Identity team's mission is to secure the world's identity connections while building the foundational trust layer for the modern enterprise. As organizations successfully adopt phishing-resistant MFA, attackers have shifted their tactics—increasingly deploying Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM) phishing kits and info-stealer malware to execute session hijacking via cookie theft. Furthermore, with the explosive rise of autonomous AI workloads, securing human identity is no longer enough; we must now protect and govern a fast-growing sprawl of non-human, agentic workflows.

About the Role

As a Principal Identity Engineer at Okta, you will be the cornerstone of our internal IAM team, driving the vision, strategy, and execution of our identity infrastructure. In this role, you will champion our "Customer Zero" philosophy, partnering directly with our product engineering teams to deploy Okta’s newest features, products, and capabilities internally before they ever hit the market.

This is a highly autonomous, high-impact role for a technical leader who acts with a fierce sense of ownership and urgency. We are looking for someone who turns action into traction, ruthlessly simplifies complex problems, and scales solutions. You will not only raise your own bar but will actively pull the rest of the team up with you, serving as a mentor and strategic visionary.

Working in close partnership with product, security, and engineering teams, you will influence the future of the platform by validating emerging capabilities, driving innovation, and ensuring the organization is ready to adopt new technologies—including AI-powered services and intelligent agents. As a trusted technical leader, you will mentor engineers, influence architectural decisions, and help determine what’s next for the platform.

Responsibilities

• Act as the primary bridge between internal stakeholders, IAM and Okta’s core Product teams. You will ensure Okta is the first to deploy its own cutting-edge capabilities, providing world-class, rigorous feedback to mature products and catch bugs before they reach global customers.
• Serve as a foundational pillar and mentor for the IAM engineering team, fostering a culture of high performance, continuous learning, and technical excellence.
• Embody the philosophy of "Move fast, simplify, and repeat." You will identify systemic inefficiencies, automate legacy processes, and champion agile execution.
• Take initiative to identify what is needed next and lead the organization toward it.
• Partner daily with cross-functional stakeholders to push the boundaries of identity security, modern authentication, and governance.
• Act as both the architect and the technical implementer for key strategic initiatives, rolling up your sleeves to implement, guide, and validate critical deployments.
• Regularly deliver clear, data-driven leadership updates, translating complex technical milestones and risks into strategic insights for Okta’s executive team.
• Establish, track, and report on key performance metrics and KPIs to prove the health, security, and maturity of our IAM ecosystem.
• Facilitate design strategy and successful execution of playbook adoption, planning, and intake processes.
• Drive the secure adoption of AI technologies by designing, deploying, and governing AI agents and AI-enabled services within the enterprise.

Technical Requirements & Qualifications

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.

• 10+ years experience implementing and/or supporting enterprise IAM solutions
• Expertise with industry IAM concepts and best practices, particularly relating to SSO, MFA, IGA, and PAM
• Deep expertise in modern authentication protocols (OIDC, OAuth 2.0, SAML 2.0) and advanced multi-factor authentication paradigms, including FIDO2/WebAuthn, passkeys, and phishing-resistant MFA.
• Comprehensive understanding of secure session lifetimes, token binding, token revocation strategies, and continuous access evaluation to mitigate session hijacking risks.
• Proven experience designing and securing machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and cloud-native service-to-service authentication.
• Deep knowledge of enterprise secrets management architectures (e.g. Okta Privileged Access) ensuring secure storage, dynamic rotation, and strict access controls.
• Advanced proficiency using IaC tools, specifically Okta Workflows and Terraform, to manage identity configuration, access policies, and cloud infrastructure as code.
• Strong background in integrating IAM configuration and testing into modern CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) to ensure safe, automated, and repeatable deployments.
• Experience leading and developing other engineers
• Leads by a automation first mindset
• Occasional travel as required

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