Staff Software Engineer (Federal)

Staff Software Engineer (Federal)

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.

The Okta Identity Governance Team

Okta Identity Governance (OIG) is Okta's Identity Governance and Administration solution, responsible for some of the most critical and visible workflows in enterprise identity: how people request access, how approvers grant it, how entitlements are enforced, and how organizations prove to auditors that only the right people have the right access.

OIG is the leading contributor to Okta's new product bookings, and it runs inside some of the largest enterprises in the world — the kind of accounts where a single tenant carries hundreds of thousands of identities across thousands of applications.

OIG currently supports high-compliance public sector workloads and plans to expand our footprint to support the most secure, highly classified environments in government.

The Staff Software Engineer (Federal) Opportunity

As a Staff Fullstack Engineer on the OIG (Federal) team, your mission is to adapt the OIG product to the needs of the government customers.

In this role, you will actively design, build, and maintain both robust backend services and intuitive frontend interfaces. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems and a commitment to AI-native engineering as our standard. You will rethink backend design, validation, and delivery through AI-augmented workflows, ensuring our platform provides secure, interoperable, and scalable access—enforcing the principle of least privilege for every aspect of the product.

What You'll Be Doing

• Architect, deploy, and maintain cloud and on-premises infrastructure across high-compliance security baselines.
• Support operations transitioning into disconnected, air-gapped, and top-secret defense environments.
• Maintain strict security controls, audit readiness, and continuous monitoring for classified networks.
• Collaborate with other engineering teams to ensure software deployments meet stringent governmental security standards.
• Proactively identify and prioritize tech debt; drive improvements in areas beyond feature work - CI/CD, observability, documentation, reliability, and support processes.
• Partner with Product and Design to understand and own the desired customer outcome, not just the technical deliverable.
• Actively invest in the growth of peer engineers, taking responsibility for raising the technical bar of the team as a whole.

What You'll Bring To The Role

• Must be a U.S. Citizen. Candidate must possess an active clearance or have the ability to obtain and maintain a high-level government security clearance (e.g., Secret / Top Secret / SCI) based on mission requirements.
• 8+ years in software engineering, shipping enterprise cloud software
• Hands-on depth in coding at scale using: Java, Python, or TypeScript, plus API (REST, gRPC) and UI automation (Playwright, Selenium, or equivalent)
• Experience with CI/CD (CircleCI or equivalent), containers (Docker, Kubernetes), and a major cloud platform
• Operates well beyond basic AI tool usage - understands how to apply AI meaningfully across the full software development lifecycle, can evaluate and adopt new AI tooling with good judgment, and is able to establish practices and bring a team along.
• Proven experience defining scalable backend architectures and integrating complex APIs with modern web technologies - including the ability to make and defend architectural decisions with lasting org-wide impact.
• Solid understanding of web authentication and authorization fundamentals - how auth flows work, and best practices for securing sensitive user data.
• Architectural expertise: Proven experience defining scalable backend architectures and integrating complex APIs with modern web technologies, including making decisions with lasting, org-wide impact.
• Backend proficiency: Deep expertise in building reliable, secure, enterprise-grade software in Java or another type-safe language.
• Frontend flexibility: High proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript with true fullstack range, including the ability to ship robust frontends.

And extra credit if you have experience in any of the following!

• Federal Infrastructure Expertise: Hands-on experience building, scaling, and troubleshooting infrastructure in restricted environments (e.g., FedRAMP Medium/High, DoD Impact Levels, or air-gapped systems).
• Network & Security Isolation: Solid understanding of air-gap architectures, strict access controls, zero-trust frameworks, and data diode/secure transfer mechanisms.
• Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) — access requests, certifications, entitlement management, separation of duties, or role modeling (Okta, SailPoint, Saviynt, One Identity, Oracle, or in-house)
• Identity and Access Management more broadly: SSO, SCIM provisioning, directory integration, or privileged access
• Work experience in a compliance context — SOX, SOC 2, ISO 27001, or FedRAMP — including audit evidence validation

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