Staff Backend Engineer - Okta Personal

The Okta Personal Team

The Okta Personal team is building the future of digital identity. The way we prove our identity online is undergoing a fundamental shift, moving from scanning physical documents to using secure, portable digital credentials. In a world with AI-driven fraud, one-time verification is no longer enough; the industry needs a reusable, tamper-proof way to prove identity at scale.

To address this massive need, our focus is on building a Verifiable Digital Credentials (VDCs) platform to power this new ecosystem. VDCs are reusable digital records that prove identity, qualifications, or skills instantly, giving holders control to share only what's necessary. We are responsible for the infrastructure, user-facing features, and business of verifying, issuing, and holding VDCs for enterprise customers. 

We are a small team of engineers, product managers, and designers who are bringing Okta’s expertise in identity to define the future of VDCs, focusing on open standards and interoperability.

The Senior Software Engineer Opportunity

As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Okta Digital Credentials (ODC) team, you will define the technical direction of a new VDC identity ecosystem and set the standard for how we build it. 

This role demands deep technical expertise in backend architecture and the ability to influence decisions across the team and adjacent engineering groups. You will thrive in a fast-paced, zero-to-one environment, cutting through ambiguity to drive product-market fit.

A distinctive part of this role is setting the team's standard for AI-native engineering. This isn't about using autocomplete faster - it's about rethinking how a small, senior team ships production-quality code at pace. In practice, that means using AI tools for architectural reasoning and design review, generating and validating test coverage, accelerating code review cycles, and helping engineers build judgment about when AI output is trustworthy and when it isn't. You'll define what "good" looks like here and bring the team along.

You'll also be a force multiplier - mentoring senior engineers, raising the technical bar through architectu

What you’ll be doing 

• Proactively shape the technical strategy and architecture of a greenfield VDC identity ecosystem, partnering with principal engineers to ensure decisions prioritize open standards and interoperability.
• Own architectural decisions in a fast-moving environment - balancing rapid delivery with long-term scalability, security, and platform integrity. Identify and mitigate technical risks before they become blockers; escalate dependencies early and widely.
• Own production health for your systems - incident response, root cause identification, and driving operational improvement projects (monitoring coverage, alert reduction, runbook quality).
• Champion high engineering standards across the team, including rigorous code reviews, comprehensive unit/functional testing, and architectural review processes to ensure the platform is tamper-proof.
• Drive continual evolution in the adoption of AI-native development practices, helping the team rethink how we design, review, and ship software with AI as a core part of the workflow.
• Proactively identify and prioritize tech debt; drive improvements in areas beyond feature work - CI/CD, observability, documentation, reliability, and support processes.
• Partner with Product and Design to understand and own the desired customer outcome, not just the technical deliverable.
• Actively invest in the growth of peer engineers, taking responsibility for raising the technical bar of the team as a whole

What you’ll bring to the role

• Operates well beyond basic AI tool usage - understands how to apply AI meaningfully across the full software development lifecycle, can evaluate and adopt new AI tooling with good judgment, and is able to establish practices and bring a team along.
• Proven experience defining scalable backend architectures and integrating complex APIs with modern web technologies - including the ability to make and defend architectural decisions with lasting org-wide impact.
•  Solid understanding of web authentication and authorization fundamentals - how auth flows work, token-based access (JWT, OAuth), and best practices for securing sensitive user data.                                                                                                                                               
• Deep expertise in building highly reliable, secure, enterprise-grade software using Java or Node.js.
• Proficiency in JavaScript or TypeScript, with the ability to navigate and contribute to the frontend to unblock feature development.
• Strong understanding of cloud architecture principles, with experience designing and operating large-scale services on AWS

And extra credit if you have experience in any of the following! 

• Hands-on experience with identity protocols such as OIDC4VP, OIDC4VCI, OAuth, and the W3C Verifiable Credentials data model.
• Prior experience leading a team of engineers through a meaningful shift in ways of working - whether around AI adoption, developer tooling, or engineering culture change.
• Practical knowledge of cryptography: public/private key infrastructure (PKI), digital signatures, and hashing, particularly in the context of Verifiable Credentials or DIDs.
• Experience building or maintaining publicly released SDKs used by external developers.
• Experience in one of the following areas is preferred: developing Identity and Access Management (IAM) tooling, working with blockchain technology, or contributing to a "zero-to-one" startup-like team

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