SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Okta is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer (P4 level) to serve as the core technical anchor and senior individual contributor for a newly established engineering pod in Bengaluru, India. The role focuses on redefining Privileged Access Management (PAM) from the ground up, purpose-built for cloud, SaaS, databases, containers, and virtualized environments.
You will take ownership of complex, ambiguous technical problems and define how to solve them cleanly, securely, and efficiently. Your primary sphere of influence will be at the team level, working closely with the local Technical Team Lead to elevate the pod's engineering craft and act as a technical multiplier for mid-level developers while ensuring tight architectural alignment with the global team.
Key responsibilities include:
**Execution & Technical Impact:** Design, code, debug, test, monitor, and deploy performant backend services and connector plugins in Go. Take well-defined product goals and ambiguous technical challenges, break them down into modular technical designs, and execute with minimal oversight. Design reliable, scalable components for database scraping and network protocol management (SSH, Telnet, SNMP) using spikes, proof-of-concepts, and telemetry to back architectural decisions.
**Operational Excellence & Engineering Craft:** Actively participate in global on-call rotation and demonstrate system-level understanding to troubleshoot complex incidents, perform root-cause analysis, and build remediation automation. Identify tech debt, streamline CI/CD pipelines, improve observability/alerting, and establish technical documentation. Proactively spot technical risks, dependency gaps, and performance bottlenecks before they impact delivery.
**Team Multiplier & Strategic Alignment:** Elevate the team's craft through thorough code reviews, establishing best practices in Go, and pairing with P2/P3 engineers. Partner with global Technical Leads to review major design proposals, manage dependencies, and ensure local execution matches global architecture strategy.
The tech stack includes Go, AWS, Serverless, Kubernetes, Postgres (RDS), ArangoDB, GitHub Actions, Docker, Terraform, and Helm.
**Requirements:**
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years building high-scale, cloud-native backend systems
- Demonstrated Staff-Level (P4) attributes: ability to independently own large tasks end-to-end, influence technical decisions across a team, and elevate the performance of surrounding engineers
- Experience in Privileged Access Management (PAM), Identity & Access Management (IAM), or deep networking infrastructure; familiarity with credential management, asset discovery, or agentless communication patterns
- Strong hands-on proficiency in Go (or deep expertise in C++/Rust/Java with proven record of mastering Go quickly)
- Hands-on experience with networking protocols (SSH, Telnet, TCP/IP), database security, microservices, and asynchronous event-driven systems
- Familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD automation, and modern telemetry/observability tools
- High empathy, humility, and clear communication skills with focus on sharing knowledge and driving positive engineering culture
**Nice to Have:**
- Direct experience at domain leaders in security/PAM such as CyberArk, Delinea, or similar IAM companies
- Experience with Graph databases (e.g., ArangoDB) or policy engines (e.g., OPA)
- Contributions to open-source infrastructure projects or technical blogging
