Principal Site Reliability Engineer
Okta · Bengaluru · Posted 2026-07-18
Tech stack: AWS, Cassandra, GCP, Go, Golang, Kubernetes, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, Redis, Terraform
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About the role
Responsibilities:
- work closely with engineering leadership, product leadership, architects, and Staff engineers to shape the future of Okta's cloud infrastructure and reliability practices.
- The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with strong organizational influence and has a proven track record of leading large-scale engineering initiatives that drive measurable business outcomes.
- Reliability Strategy & Architecture
- Define and drive the reliability strategy for critical product and platform services.
- Establish standards for availability, resilience, observability, incident management, and operational readiness.
- Lead architecture reviews for critical services and platform initiatives.
- Partner with engineering leaders to ensure reliability objectives align with business priorities and customer expectations.
- Create frameworks, standards, and operational guardrails that enable engineering teams to operate safely at scale.
- Guide service architecture toward simplicity, scalability, resilience, and operational excellence.
- Drive major initiatives that improve platform maturity and long-term sustainability.
- Product & Platform Leadership
- Own reliability architecture and operational excellence for the Spera / ISPM product area.
- Collaborate closely with engineering leadership to establish reliability objectives and technical roadmaps.
- Lead large-scale scalability, resiliency, and performance initiatives.
- Partner with platform and product engineering teams to build self-service operational capabilities that improve developer productivity while strengthening reliability and security.
- Influence technical direction through data-driven recommendations, engineering expertise, and collaborative leadership.
- Support highly available, large-scale cloud environments as part of an on-call rotation.
- Engineering & Automation
- Design, build, and operate large-scale cloud infrastructure and production services.
- Develop software, automation, and infrastructure using Go, Python, Terraform, and related technologies.
- Eliminate operational toil through automation, tooling, and platform engineering.
- Improve deployment safety, operational workflows, and platform consistency through GitOps and Infrastructure-as-Code practices.
- Collaborate on modernizing existing workloads and aligning them with evolving platform capabilities.
- Lead complex engineering initiatives from conception through production rollout and long-term operational ownership.
- Technical Leadership
- Mentor Staff and Senior engineers across multiple teams and organizations.
- Lead technical reviews, design reviews, and operational readiness assessments.
- Build engineering consensus across teams with differing priorities and objectives.
- Help develop the next generation of technical leaders within Okta.
- Drive adoption of reliability engineering best practices across EPG.
- Share patterns, tooling, and operational practices across Workflows, Inbox, PAM, and ISPM teams.
- Influence technical direction through expertise, collaboration, and execution rather than organizational authority.
- AI & Agentic Operations
- Lead the exploration and adoption of AI-assisted reliability engineering practices across EPG.
- Design and champion agentic systems that accelerate troubleshooting, incident response, root-cause analysis, and operational decision-making.
- Evaluate emerging AI technologies and identify practical opportunities to improve reliability engineering workflows.
- Establish best practices for safe, effective, and measurable use of AI within production operations.
- Drive initiatives that reduce operational toil and improve engineering productivity through intelligent automation.
- Our Tech Stack
- Infrastructure/Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS/GKE), Terraform, Helm, Git, ArgoCD, Gitops
- Programming: Golang, Python
- Observability: Datadog, Splunk
- Data Stores: PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch
Qualifications:
- Technical Excellence
- Extensive experience designing and operating large-scale production systems in AWS and/or GCP.
- Deep expertise with Kubernetes in production environments.
- Experience designing reliability strategies for Kubernetes-based platforms.
- Strong expertise troubleshooting Kubernetes networking, storage, scheduling, scaling, and workload lifecycle challenges.
- Extensive experience with Infrastructure as Code technologies such as Terraform and Helm.
- Strong software engineering skills in Golang and/or Python.
- Experience building internal platforms, developer tooling, and operational automation.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems architecture and cloud-native application design.
- Strong understanding of cloud networking fundamentals including DNS, service discovery, ingress, load balancing, TLS, traffic management, and multi-region architectures.
- Experience operating and troubleshooting distributed data platforms such as PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch, MySQL, Cassandra, or similar technologies.
- Experience establishing observability standards, monitoring strategies, and operational best practices across engineering organizations.
- Experience with or strong interest in AI-assisted engineering and operational automation.
- Reliability & Operational Excellence
- Strong expertise operating customer-facing production systems at scale.
- Deep understanding of reliability engineering principles including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, and resilience engineering.
- Experience leading major incident response efforts and driving long-term operational improvements.
- Strong understanding of CI/CD, GitOps, deployment strategies, and automation-first operational practices.
- Proven success driving large-scale reliability transformations and architectural modernization efforts.
- Ability to balance reliability, scalability, security, customer experience, and engineering velocity.
- Security & Compliance
- Strong understanding of cloud security fundamentals, IAM, secrets management, and secure infrastructure design.
- Experience operating systems within security-sensitive or regulated environments is a plus.
- Familiarity with operational controls, compliance requirements, and security best practices in cloud-native environments.
- Leadership & Influence
- Demonstrated success leading complex technical initiatives across multiple teams and organizations.
- Demonstrated ability to drive technical strategy and influence engineering outcomes across multiple organizations and leadership teams.
- Proven ability to influence technical direction without direct organizational authority.
- Experience working effectively within globally distributed engineering organizations spanning multiple timezones and cultures.
- Strong collaboration, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
- Experience mentoring Staff engineers and helping develop future technical leaders.
- Ability to translate business objectives into technical strategy and measurable reliability outcomes.
- Experience working closely with engineering leadership, architects, and product leaders to drive organizational change.
- Experience operating SaaS platforms serving millions of users.
- Experience supporting globally distributed production environments.
- Experience leading platform engineering or reliability transformation initiatives.
- Experience implementing AI-assisted operational tooling, agentic workflows, or intelligent automation platforms.
- Prior experience as a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior technical leader in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Cloud Operations.
- LI-Hybrid #P25309_3469886
- Supporting Your Well-Being
- Driving Social Impact
- Developing Talent and Fostering Connection + Community
Qualifications
- Technical Excellence Extensive experience designing and operating large-scale production systems in AWS and/or GCP.
- Deep expertise with Kubernetes in production environments.
- Experience designing reliability strategies for Kubernetes-based platforms.
- Strong expertise troubleshooting Kubernetes networking, storage, scheduling, scaling, and workload lifecycle challenges.
- Extensive experience with Infrastructure as Code technologies such as Terraform and Helm.
- Strong software engineering skills in Golang and/or Python.
- Experience building internal platforms, developer tooling, and operational automation.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems architecture and cloud-native application design.
- Strong understanding of cloud networking fundamentals including DNS, service discovery, ingress, load balancing, TLS, traffic management, and multi-region architectures.
- Experience operating and troubleshooting distributed data platforms such as PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch, MySQL
- Cassandra, or similar technologies.
- Experience establishing observability standards, monitoring strategies, and operational best practices across engineering organizations.
- Experience with or strong interest in AI-assisted engineering and operational automation.
- Reliability & Operational Excellence
- Strong expertise operating customer-facing production systems at scale.
- Deep understanding of reliability engineering principles including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, and resilience engineering.
- Experience leading major incident response efforts and driving long-term operational improvements.
- Strong understanding of CI/CD, GitOps, deployment strategies, and automation-first operational practices.
- Proven success driving large-scale reliability transformations and architectural modernization efforts.
- Ability to balance reliability, scalability, security, customer experience, and engineering velocity.
- Security & Compliance
- Strong understanding of cloud security fundamentals, IAM, secrets management, and secure infrastructure design.
- Experience operating systems within security-sensitive or regulated environments is a plus.
- Familiarity with operational controls, compliance requirements, and security best practices in cloud-native environments.
- Leadership & Influence
- Demonstrated success leading complex technical initiatives across multiple teams and organizations.
- Demonstrated ability to drive technical strategy and influence engineering outcomes across multiple organizations and leadership teams.
- Proven ability to influence technical direction without direct organizational authority.
- Experience working effectively within globally distributed engineering organizations spanning multiple timezones and cultures.
- Strong collaboration, communication, and stakeholder management skills.
- Experience mentoring Staff engineers and helping develop future technical leaders.
- Ability to translate business objectives into technical strategy and measurable reliability outcomes.
- Experience working closely with engineering leadership, architects, and product leaders to drive organizational change.
- Experience operating SaaS platforms serving millions of users.
- Experience supporting globally distributed production environments.
- Experience leading platform engineering or reliability transformation initiatives.
- Experience implementing AI-assisted operational tooling, agentic workflows, or intelligent automation platforms.
- Prior experience as a Staff, Principal, or equivalent senior technical leader in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Cloud Operations.
- LI-Hybrid #P25309_3469886 Supporting Your Well-Being
- Driving Social Impact
- Developing Talent and Fostering Connection + Community
Responsibilities
- work closely with engineering leadership, product leadership, architects, and Staff engineers to shape the future of Okta's cloud infrastructure and reliability practices.
- The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with strong organizational influence and has a proven track record of leading large-scale engineering initiatives that drive measurable business outcomes.
- Reliability Strategy & Architecture
- Define and drive the reliability strategy for critical product and platform services.
- Establish standards for availability, resilience, observability, incident management, and operational readiness.
- Lead architecture reviews for critical services and platform initiatives.
- Partner with engineering leaders to ensure reliability objectives align with business priorities and customer expectations.
- Create frameworks, standards, and operational guardrails that enable engineering teams to operate safely at scale.
- Guide service architecture toward simplicity, scalability, resilience, and operational excellence.
- Drive major initiatives that improve platform maturity and long-term sustainability.
- Product & Platform Leadership
- Own reliability architecture and operational excellence for the Spera / ISPM product area.
- Collaborate closely with engineering leadership to establish reliability objectives and technical roadmaps.
- Lead large-scale scalability, resiliency, and performance initiatives.
- Partner with platform and product engineering teams to build self-service operational capabilities that improve developer productivity while strengthening reliability and security.
- Influence technical direction through data-driven recommendations, engineering expertise, and collaborative leadership.
- Support highly available, large-scale cloud environments as part of an on-call rotation.
- Engineering & Automation
- Design, build, and operate large-scale cloud infrastructure and production services.
- Develop software, automation, and infrastructure using Go, Python, Terraform, and related technologies.
- Eliminate operational toil through automation, tooling, and platform engineering.
- Improve deployment safety, operational workflows, and platform consistency through GitOps and Infrastructure-as-Code practices.
- Collaborate on modernizing existing workloads and aligning them with evolving platform capabilities.
- Lead complex engineering initiatives from conception through production rollout and long-term operational ownership.
- Technical Leadership Mentor Staff and Senior engineers across multiple teams and organizations.
- Lead technical reviews, design reviews, and operational readiness assessments.
- Build engineering consensus across teams with differing priorities and objectives.
- Help develop the next generation of technical leaders within Okta.
- Drive adoption of reliability engineering best practices across EPG.
- Share patterns, tooling, and operational practices across Workflows, Inbox, PAM, and ISPM teams.
- Influence technical direction through expertise, collaboration, and execution rather than organizational authority.
- AI & Agentic Operations
- Lead the exploration and adoption of AI-assisted reliability engineering practices across EPG.
- Design and champion agentic systems that accelerate troubleshooting, incident response, root-cause analysis, and operational decision-making.
- Evaluate emerging AI technologies and identify practical opportunities to improve reliability engineering workflows.
- Establish best practices for safe, effective, and measurable use of AI within production operations.
- Drive initiatives that reduce operational toil and improve engineering productivity through intelligent automation.
- Our Tech Stack
- Infrastructure/Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS/GKE), Terraform, Helm, Git, ArgoCD, Gitops Programming: Golang, Python
- Observability: Datadog, Splunk
- Data Stores: PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch