Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Job Summary

We are looking for an experienced Staff Site Reliability Engineer to join Okta's Emerging Products Group (EPG). As a Staff Site Reliability Engineer, you will serve as a technical leader within the EPG SRE organization, partnering closely with software engineers, architects, and product teams to design, build, and operate world-class cloud services.

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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.