Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Federal (TS/SCI)

About the Role

Okta's Federal SRE team for the Emerging Products Group (EPG) is seeking an experienced Staff Site Reliability Engineer. Our mission is to build highly reliable, scalable, and secure cloud services that our customers can trust. We embrace an automation-first mindset and continuously invest in platform engineering, observability, and operational excellence.

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.

Security & Clearance Requirements

• Security Clearance: Active U.S. TS/SCI clearance with Full Scope Poly
• Compliance Expertise: Proven experience navigating Federal and DoD compliance frameworks, specifically FedRAMP and Impact Level 6 (IL6)
• U.S. Soil Status: The employee must be on U.S. soil as defined in FAR 2.101

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.
• Modernize existing workloads and align them with evolving platform capabilities.
• Build self-service platforms, operational guardrails, and automation to improve developer velocity while maintaining reliability and security.

Technical Leadership & Innovation

• Lead complex reliability initiatives spanning multiple engineering teams.
• Guide and mentor engineers in adopting operational best practices, reliability engineering principles, and incident analysis.
• Influence architecture and operational decisions through data-driven recommendations.
• Drive projects from conception through production rollout and long-term ownership.
• Explore and apply AI-assisted engineering techniques to improve operational efficiency, incident response, troubleshooting, and automation.

Qualifications

Required

• Strong experience operating large-scale production services in AWS and/or GCP.
• Deep expertise with Kubernetes in production environments, including troubleshooting networking, storage, scheduling, scaling, and 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 (e.g., PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch, MySQL, Cassandra, or similar).
• Strong understanding of cloud networking fundamentals (DNS, load balancing, ingress, TLS, service networking, and traffic management).
• Experience with observability platforms, monitoring strategies, and production telemetry.
• Deep understanding of reliability engineering concepts (SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning).
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, and automation-first operational practices.
• Understanding of cloud security fundamentals, IAM, secrets management, and secure infrastructure design.
• Proven track record of leading complex engineering initiatives and mentoring engineers.

Preferred

• 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.
• Experience implementing operational controls in regulated or security-sensitive environments.