Staff Software Engineer

Okta is the leading independent provider of enterprise identity. The Okta Identity Cloud enables organizations to securely connect the right people to the right technologies at the right time. With over 6,500 pre-built integrations to applications and infrastructure providers, Okta customers can easily and securely use the best technologies for their business. Over 7,950 organizations, including 20th Century Fox, JetBlue, Nordstorm, Slack, Teach for America and Twilio, trust Okta to help protect the identities of their workforces and customers.

Position Description

We are seeking an experienced Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical evolution of the Okta Recovery Vault (ORV). This team is responsible for Okta’s enterprise-grade soft-delete and object recovery capability, designed to protect critical identity objects (Users and Groups) from accidental or malicious deletion.

As a Staff Engineer, you will own the architectural design and implementation of a real-time, high-fidelity recovery system that preserves object identity (UUIDs) and restores complex relationships—including group memberships, app assignments, and password hashes. You will drive technical strategy to bridge the gap where deletions were previously permanent and irreversible.

Job Duties and Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: Lead the architectural design and implementation strategy for the Recovery Vault, ensuring high performance and scalability.
• System Ownership: Independently own and deliver end-to-end features, such as granular and bulk recovery workflows, across both Free and Advanced Resilience tiers.
• Architecture & Migration: Design core components for real-time recovery that capture every deletion event, ensuring superiority over point-in-time third-party backup providers.
• Relationship & State Management: Solve complex challenges regarding relationship restoration (group memberships, app assignments, device enrollments) and identity preservation (UUID).
• Security & Compliance: Ensure all recovery actions (soft-delete, restore, permanent-delete) are logged in Syslog to maintain audit compliance.
• Collaboration: Partner with Product Management to refine the “how” of features like configurable retention periods (7 to 90 days) and self-service recovery UIs.
• Operational Excellence: Troubleshoot complex production incidents, perform root cause analysis, and drive improvements in observability and alerting.
• Mentorship: Provide technical guidance to senior and junior engineers on the team.

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Experience: 7+ years of software development experience building highly-reliable, mission-critical software at scale.
• Java Expertise: Deep expertise with object-oriented languages, particularly Java and the Spring Boot framework.
• Distributed Systems: Strong understanding of distributed job processing, asynchronous processing, and event-driven architectures (essential for bulk restore jobs).
• Identity Standards: Expert knowledge of Identity and Access Management protocols (SCIM, SAML, OAuth, OIDC) and directory services (AD, LDAP).
• Data Management: Solid experience with relational databases (MySQL) and caching layers (Redis) to manage captured object snapshots.
• API Design: Proven track record with RESTful APIs to support API-first recovery for enterprise automation.
• Leadership: Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects independently and influence cross-team initiatives.

Nice to Haves

• Experience with data modeling for relationship management and identity resolution.
• Knowledge of Recycle Bin capabilities for competitive benchmarking.
• Experience with gradual rollout strategies and feature flag frameworks.
• Background in building resilient systems with retry logic and circuit breakers.

Education and Training

• B.S. in Computer Science or a related field.

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