Okta is a company focused on securing identities and building trusted infrastructure. They are seeking a Staff Data Engineer to lead the architectural evolution of their core data platform and ensure its compliance with FEDRamp, while collaborating across various teams to design and implement scalable data systems.
Responsibilities:
- Lead the architectural design and evolution of our data platform, defining the roadmap for its future state
- Drive technical strategy for large-scale platform enhancements, balancing long-term goals with incremental delivery
- Collaborate deeply with engineers and leaders from other data, platform, and security teams to create a unified and secure architecture
- Produce architectural artifacts, including design documents, threat models, and technical specifications, to create clarity and alignment for complex initiatives
- Act as a technical mentor and force-multiplier for the Data Engineering team, elevating the performance of the group through guidance, code reviews, and sharing best practices
- Implement foundational components of new architecture, proving out designs with hands-on coding and providing a model for other engineers to follow
Requirements:
- A passion for building secure, reliable, and scalable data systems
- 8+ years of software development experience, with at least 5+ years in a data engineering or data platform role
- Proven experience designing and delivering large-scale, cross-functional technical projects
- Extensive experience architecting and deploying data infrastructure in a cloud environment (AWS strongly preferred)
- Deep architectural knowledge of the modern data stack, including data warehouses (Snowflake), transformation tools (dbt), and orchestrators (Airflow)
- Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, with a high bar for code quality and system design
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to create clarity and drive decisions on complex technical topics
- The ability to deal with ambiguity, define a path forward, and lead others to successful outcomes
- 8+ years of strong coding and scripting experience, with a focus on building automation and custom tooling for infrastructure and data pipelines. Experience with Python is required; proficiency in other languages (e.g., Bash, PowerShell, Go) is a plus
- Experience developing and maintaining ETL/ELT pipelines for onboarding security data into Okta's security data lake
- Experience working with security teams to integrate log sources and ensure seamless data ingestion
- Ability to build and maintain scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines to process security event data
- Proven track record of automating security controls and workflows using a cloud-first approach
- Experience with Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code tools to orchestrate security infrastructure
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines for security automation and drift management
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to collaborate with technical staff, support teams, executive leadership, and external vendors
- Current or previous Secret, Top Secret (TS), or Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearance is a plus
- This position requires the ability to access federal environments and/or have access to protected federal data. As a condition of employment for this position, the successful candidate must be able to submit documentation establishing U.S. Person status (e.g. a U.S. Citizen, National, Lawful Permanent Resident, Refugee, or Asylee. 22 CFR 120.15) upon hire
- Direct experience with security compliance frameworks like FEDRamp, SOC2, or HIPAA
- Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
- Experience working in government cloud environments (e.g., AWS GovCloud)
- Familiarity with the Identity Access & Management (IAM) domain
- 2+ years of experience building engineering solutions within highly regulated environments such as FedRAMP High, IL4, IL5, and/or IL6 is a plus
- Advanced identity management technologies (MFA, SAML, OAuth, OIDC, WebAuthn)
- Deep understanding of Okta's ecosystem, including advanced configuration and integrations
- Experience with continuous compliance solutions (e.g., policy-as-code, automated evidence gathering)