Site Reliability Engineer, Security

We safeguard Okta from threats and vulnerabilities that have the potential to disrupt our business or degrade our customers’ trust in us.

In addition to driving security in our enterprise environment and Okta service, the Security team is deeply entrenched in the Okta business. The team contributes to product roadmaps, promoting trust, research and other strategic aspects of Okta’s operations. We work across multiple functions, business partners and the research community. We are an engineering-focused team that seeks to stay on the cutting edge of security technology and the threat landscape.

The role:

Okta is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to take on a key role within Okta’s Cyber Defense team, reporting to the Director of Defensive Cyber Engineering. In this role you will focus on maintaining and improving the reliability, automation, and scalability of cyber defense systems supporting a variety of teams within Cyber Defense. You will have the opportunity to work closely with detection and response engineers, threat researchers, adversarial engineers and platform teams to ensure our security tools and infrastructure are robust, resilient, and high-performing.

This role is ideal for someone with experience in planning, building, shipping Python applications as well as familiarity working with common AWS services. Reliability Engineering is a key part of this role, as we monitor our own services.

Core Responsibilities:

Security tooling and operations support:

• Security tooling 
• Work closely with Cyber Defense staff to build, maintain, and ensure seamless operation of detection pipelines, case management, threat intelligence, and forensic investigation tools.
• Implement, and optimize scalable and resilient infrastructure for cyber detection and response systems.
• Monitor and improve the availability, latency, and performance of security tools, ensuring high uptime and efficiency.
• Troubleshoot issues with security tooling, ensuring rapid resolution of outages and performance degradations.

Automation & Infrastructure as Code (IaC):

• Develop and maintain automation scripts, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) configurations, and CI/CD pipelines for cyber defense tooling.
• Automate deployment, scaling, and configuration of Okta’s detection pipelines, log management, threat intelligence, and other security systems.
• Implement self-healing mechanisms to reduce operational toil and manual troubleshooting.

Observability & Incident response support:

• Implement monitoring and observability solutions to track the health and performance of security infrastructure.
• Develop dashboards and alerting systems to provide real-time insights into system reliability and security event processing.
• Support security incident response efforts by ensuring log availability, query efficiency, and forensic data integrity.

Collaboration and Continuous Improvement:

• Participate in post-incident reviews, identifying areas for improvement and implementing reliability enhancements.
• Stay up to date with best practices in SRE, DevOps, and cloud security to enhance operational effectiveness.

What does it take?

You’re a team player. You have great communications skills and a thirst for knowledge. You’re curious about systems and how they interact, knowing that to properly defend a system you must first understand how it works. You enjoy automating tasks and if you can’t find a tool for the job you create one. You’re calm under pressure and have a good internal compass for taking calculated risks.

If you don’t have a degree, you have equivalent experience that’s given you the foundational knowledge to understand complex computing environments.

People want to work with you. You want to learn what it takes to build a world-class defensive cyber capability and you’re passionate about helping make ours stronger. Your experience probably includes:

• Contributing to technology focused teams large or small.
• Continuously learning and taking on opportunities to grow within your role.
• Production and critical app development in Python
• Experience developing and monitoring serverless applications in AWS
• Experience working with infrastructure as code and developing CI/CI pipelines.

It would be fantastic, but not essential, if you also have experience in one or more of the following areas:

• Building and supporting tools for Cyber Security or Data Analytics teams.
• Working collaboratively within product and/or enterprise project teams, assisting to deliver large and complex technology solutions.

#LI-Hybrid