Principal Software Engineer, Lifecycle Management

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.

Position Description

Okta is an enterprise-grade identity management platform, built from the ground up in the cloud and delivered with an unwavering focus on customer success. With Okta, organizations can manage access across any application, person, or device. Whether the people are employees, partners, or customers or the applications are in the cloud, on-premises, or on a mobile device, Okta helps organizations become more secure, make people more productive, and maintain compliance.

The Okta platform provides directory services, single sign-on, strong authentication, provisioning, workflow, and built-in reporting. It runs in the cloud on a secure, reliable, extensively audited platform and integrates deeply with on-premises applications, directories, and identity management systems.

We are looking for an experienced Principal Backend Engineer to work on our Onboarding and Lifecycle Management (LCM) Platform team with a focus on enhancing, scaling, and managing backend services for importing, syncing, and provisioning identities and access policies (users, groups, roles, entitlements, etc.). These features allow customers the flexibility to link and enhance their business processes with Okta’s identity management product.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on backend expert in Java who is deeply technical, passionate about building high-quality, secure, and performant backend applications and microservices, and capable of driving technical strategy while mentoring other engineers.

Job Duties and Responsibilities

• Lead the backend architectural design, implementation, and operational maintenance of features and microservices, prioritizing scalability, reliability, performance, and security.
• Drive key technical initiatives across backend platform workstreams, collaborating closely with product managers, architects, and engineering sub-teams.

• Provide deep technical mentorship and sponsorship for key initiatives led by Senior and Staff engineers, multiplying their impact and ensuring alignment with company strategy.

• Design and build high-throughput, low-latency REST/gRPC APIs, asynchronous messaging pipelines, and backend infrastructure for identity lifecycle management.
• Partner with Product Development, QA, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams for scoping, testing, and deploying backend services at scale.
• Drive engineering excellence and best practices around robust testing, observability, monitoring, and operational readiness.
• Mentor Senior and Staff engineers, fostering a strong culture of technical growth and ownership.

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong backend concentration.
• Proven expertise in Java and modern backend frameworks (such as Spring Boot and Hibernate).
• Strong track record of designing, building, and operating scalable backend services and microservices in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Deep understanding of infrastructure level technologies: caching, stream processing, resilient architectures.
• Solid experience with relational databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL) and data modeling for high-scale systems.
• Strong understanding of asynchronous messaging systems (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) and distributed caching solutions.
• Strong grasp of computer science principles, design patterns, object-oriented design, and secure architecture.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills to work effectively across distributed teams.

Nice to Haves

• Knowledge of Identity and Access Management (IAM) protocols and standards (e.g., OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, SCIM).
• Experience with threat modeling, security engineering, and secure API design.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).

Education

• B.S. / B.E. in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

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**The Okta Experien…