Staff Software Engineering (Stream Processing- Identity Threat Protection)

The Identity Threat Protection Team

Okta's Identity Threat Protection (ITP) team is at the forefront of trust and security for the digital world. We build the platform services that protect our customers from attack and abuse. Our team focuses on securing the Okta Customer Identity Cloud, which enables the world's largest brands to provide safe, seamless access for their users.

At the heart of our defense is a real-time data platform that processes billions of events to detect threats. We are a team of Data Scientists, ML engineers, and Java developers building a next-generation security system that leverages Okta AI to continuously evaluate threats. Your work on our stream processing engine will be the foundation that powers our risk-based authentication policies and machine learning models.

The Staff Software Engineer Opportunity

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer specializing in Stream Processing to lead the architecture and development of our core data ingestion and threat detection pipelines. You will be responsible for designing, building, and scaling the Flink-based systems that process massive volumes of security signals in real-time. This is a critical, high-impact role where you will solve complex security and distributed systems challenges at an immense scale.

As a subject matter expert, you will set the technical vision for stream processing within the team, mentor other engineers, and ensure our data platform is robust, performant, and reliable. You will share our passion for elegant solutions and will join an engineering team that strongly believes in designing for scale, rigorous code reviews, and automated testing.

What you'll be doing

• Own the architectural design, development, and delivery of our cloud-native, real-time stream processing platform, with a focus on Apache Flink.
• Engineer data pipelines for large-scale data ingestion and feature engineering to power our machine learning models and complex rule-based systems.
• Develop across the entire Okta stack, from core Java services to our microservice architecture
• Lead the evaluation and implementation of new data technologies to solve complex security and ML challenges.
• Mentor senior and junior engineers on distributed systems best practices and stream processing design patterns.
• Evaluate and optimize for trade-offs between correctness, robustness, performance, and cost to ensure our platform operates effectively at scale.
• Participate in on-call rotations to expeditiously unblock customers and make them successful

What you'll bring to the role

• 8+ years of strong software development experience in an object-oriented language, with deep expertise in Java.
• Demonstrated expertise in designing, building, and operating large-scale stream processing systems using frameworks like Flink or Storm; Flink experience is highly desired.
• Proven experience with data ingestion at scale and building complex data pipelines.
• Strong experience with cloud-native architecture and rolling out microservices at enterprise scale.
• An excellent grasp of software engineering principles, scalability patterns, and security engineering.
• Experience working with a variety of data stores including RDBMS, NoSQL, and time-series databases.
• Experience working with Kafka streams at scal

And extra credit if you have experience in any of the following!

• Experience with machine learning / Python and collaborating with Data Scientists.
• Experience building anomaly detection or risk systems.
• Experience in cloud security, identity, and/or authentication protocols.

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