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Salary: CAD 184,000 - 253,000 / annual
Okta is building identity infrastructure for the AI era. The Okta Secures AI team is creating the industry's first Identity Security Fabric for agents, addressing the 'Shadow AI' crisis by moving identity from reactive gatekeeper to unified control plane. The Agent Access Policies sub-team is implementing a four-pillar maturity model: Discover, Onboard, Protect, and Govern, with pioneering work on agentic identity standards and protocols like MCP.
As Principal Software Engineer, you will serve as the technical leader and compass for this team. You'll work across the platform tackling highly complex, vaguely specified problems and turning them into clear technical directions the team can execute against without day-to-day oversight. You'll own how the platform is architected to scale: the distributed systems behind it, reliability and consistency guarantees, and coherence that keeps it easy to build on as usage grows.
Key responsibilities include:
- Set technical direction for the Agent Access Policies framework and make cross-cutting decisions that keep it coherent and scalable
- Design distributed systems for throughput, reliability, and consistency under real load
- Transform vaguely specified platform problems into clear, modular technical designs
- Shape the platform to serve both human and agent consumers equally
- Set standards for how the team designs, builds, and operates the platform; lead constructive reviews that grow engineers
- Operate peer-to-peer with tech leads in adjacent teams on major architectural decisions
- Drive adoption of AI-native development practices within the team
- Proactively identify and prioritize tech debt across CI/CD, observability, documentation, reliability, and support
- Partner with Product and Design to own customer outcomes, not just technical deliverables
- Actively invest in growth of peer engineers and raise the technical bar team-wide
Requirements:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with proven track record as Principal or Staff level individual contributor
- Extensive experience designing and operating high-scale, reliable backend and event-driven systems with strong grasp of throughput, consistency, and failure handling tradeoffs
- Ability to own vaguely specified problems and drive them to clear technical direction without heavy top-down scoping
- Experience working across engineering, product, and architecture in fast-moving environment with habit of raising the bar
- Proven experience defining scalable backend architectures and integrating complex APIs with modern web technologies; ability to make and defend architectural decisions with lasting org-wide impact
- Solid understanding of web authentication and authorization fundamentals (auth flows, best practices for securing sensitive data)
- Deep expertise in building reliable, secure, enterprise-grade software in Java or another type-safe language
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field
Strong plus:
- Prior experience leading a team through meaningful shift in ways of working (AI adoption, developer tooling, engineering culture change)
Extra credit:
- Experience with identity, authorization, or IAM protocols (OAuth, OIDC, SAML)
- Hands-on familiarity with agentic tooling, MCP, or LLM-facing design; sense for how agents consume a platform
