Staff Engineer, Performance Tuning

The Okta Customer Identity Cloud (CIC) is a product unit of Okta focussed on the Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) space. We are looking for exceptional new team members to join our team and help drive our next level of success. One team, one score!

Our vision is to free everyone to safely use any technology.  We provide secure access for everyone, but not just anyone. We process billions of logins per month (and growing!). So, if you’re a big thinker who is nimble and adaptable, Okta CIC may be an ideal place for you to shine.

The Team & Role:

Okta is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Performance Engineering team. 

Okta’s customer identity business is growing and evolving quickly.  Traffic volume has grown substantially and new features are continually introduced.  As a cloud-based SaaS provider, bringing scalable, high performance identity solutions to production at an attractive price is a priority for our business.  The Performance Engineering team has a cross-functional charter that involves investigating, identifying, and remediating performance bottlenecks across all parts of our distributed system machinery.  This includes the code we write, datastores, messaging systems, infrastructure, and the points at which different parts of the system communicate with one another.  The Performance Engineering team works closely with component owners, test engineers, and architects to identify performance bottlenecks, and then develops software changes or other recommendations to improve performance.

What You Will Do

• As a Staff Engineer, you will perform analysis and write code to remove performance bottlenecks throughout our software.
• Develop software in Node.js and some Golang in multiple services that will run in production and help us serve billions of logins per month.
• Write decision records and RFC’s to communicate technical tradeoffs and approaches and drive awareness and consensus.
• You will work cross-functionally with service owners, architects, project managers, as well as platform and quality teams to drive performance improvements across our tech stack.
• You will nurture a “shift left” culture for performance.  You will work to improve knowledge and awareness of performance management techniques, tools, patterns, and solutions throughout Engineering in order to address performance issues earlier in the software development life cycle.
• You will have the opportunity to work with all parts of the Customer Identity Cloud service offering, including code, infrastructure, and architecture.

What You Bring

• Experience in senior software engineering roles in a remote work environment.
• Strong self-motivation and aptitude for investigation and experimentation.
• Experience developing application software in Node.js using frameworks such as Hapi.js or Fastify.  Familiarity with Golang is also a plus.
• Experience with API-driven cloud-native distributed system application architecture running in Kubernetes, AWS, and Azure.
• Experience with APM tools such as Datadog APM, Splunk, Honeycomb, New Relic, Dynatrace, or similar.
• Familiarity with PostgreSQL and MongoDB.
• Experience designing and executing performance experiments designed to validate performance improvements in key metrics such as requests per second (RPS), P95 and P99 latency, query performance, request concurrency, CPU/memory utilization, and cost efficiency.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.  In particular, the ability to convey technical issues and solutions in written form and work with disparate teams is important in a remote-friendly team.
• Passion for driving performance improvement in software without sacrificing reliability or security.
• Excellent collaboration skills and a track record of cross-functional collaboration.  One team, one score!

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