Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Federal (TS/SCI)

About the Position

Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Federal (TS/SCI)

Maryland; Washington, DC

Secure Every Identity, from AI to Human

Identity is the key to unlocking the potential of AI. Okta secures AI by building the trusted, neutral infrastructure that enables organizations to safely embrace this new era. This work requires a relentless drive to solve complex challenges with real-world stakes. We are looking for builders and owners who operate with speed and urgency and execute with excellence.

This is an opportunity to do career-defining work. We're all in on this mission. If you are too, let's talk.

Responsibilities

Reliability & Operations

• 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.

Engineering & Automation

• 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.

Technical Leadership

• 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.

Innovation

• 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.

Requirements

Technical Excellence

• 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.

Operational Excellence

• 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.

Security & Compliance

• 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.

Leadership

• 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.

Nice to Have

• 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.

We Offer

• Competitive Salary: Annual base salary range between $174,000-$238,000 USD.
• Equity: Part of Okta's equity program.
• Bonus: Performance-based bonuses.
• Benefits: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k), flexible spending account, and paid leave (including PTO and parental leave).
• Hybrid Work Location: Flexible work arrangements.

About the Company

The Okta Experience

• Supporting Your Well-Being: Comprehensive wellness programs.
• Driving Social Impact: Opportunities to make a difference.
• Developing Talent and Fostering Connection + Community: Global community with over 20 offices worldwide.

We are intentional about connection. Our global community, spanning over 20 offices worldwide, is united by a drive to innovate. Your journey begins with an immersive, in-person onboarding experience designed to accelerate your impact and connect you to our mission and team from day one.

Okta is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, or status as a protected veteran. We also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and convictions records, consistent with applicable laws.

If reasonable accommodation is needed to complete any part of the job application, interview process, or onboarding please use this Form to request an accommodation.

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