Staff Data Engineer - Defensive Cyber Engineering

Get to know Okta

Okta is The World's Identity Company. We free everyone to safely use any technology, anywhere, on any device or app. Our flexible and neutral products, Okta Platform and Auth0 Platform, provide secure access, authentication, and automation, placing identity at the core of business security and growth.

At Okta, we celebrate a variety of perspectives and experiences. We are not looking for someone who checks every single box - we're looking for lifelong learners and people who can make us better with their unique experiences.

Join our team! We're building a world where Identity belongs to you.

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 Staff Data Engineer to take on a key role within Okta's Cyber Defense team, reporting to the Director of Defensive Cyber Engineering. You will be responsible for building and maintaining scalable security data pipelines, ensuring data quality and governance, and enabling advanced security analytics. You will have the opportunity to work closely with detection and response engineers, threat researchers, adversarial engineers and platform teams to enhance data-driven security operations.

• Develop and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines for onboarding security data into Okta's security data lake.
• Work with security teams to integrate log sources and ensure seamless data ingestion.
• Build and maintain scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines to process security event data.
• Optimize data storage, transformation, and retrieval for real-time and batch security analytics ensuring performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Evaluate and implement new data processing frameworks and cloud-native technologies.

• Define and implement data quality metrics, lineage tracking, and observability tools.
• Develop automated data validation, schema enforcement, and anomaly detection mechanisms.
• Ensure compliance with security and privacy regulations related to logging and data storage.
• Troubleshoot data issues, inconsistencies, and latency concerns.

• Partner with Cyber Defense teams to build advanced analytics models for threat detection and security insights.
• Enable security data science and machine learning initiatives by structuring and enriching datasets.
• Automate workflows to reduce operational overhead and improve security decision-making.

• Participate in post-incident reviews, identifying areas for improvement and implementing reliability enhancements.
• Stay up to date with best practices in data engineering, analytics, and threat detection to enhance operational effectiveness.

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:

• 10+ years of experience as Software Engineering with 5 years in Data Engineering.
• Expert proficiency in SQL and Python, Snowflake and AWS.
• Strong knowledge of data lake architectures, streaming data processing, and event-driven architectures.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native data tools.

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

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

#LI-REMOTE

What you can look forward to as a Full-Time Okta employee!

• Amazing Benefits
• Making Social Impact
• Developing Talent and Fostering Connection + Community at Okta

Okta cultivates a dynamic work environment, providing the best tools, technology and benefits to empower our employees to work productively in a setting that best and uniquely suits their needs. Each organization is unique in the degree of flexibility and mobility in which they work so that all employees are enabled to be their most creative and successful versions of themselves, regardless of where they live. Find your place at Okta today! https://www.okta.com/company/careers/.

Some roles may require travel to one of our office locations for in-person onboarding.

Okta is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, or status as a protected veteran. We also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and convictions records, consistent with applicable laws.

If reasonable accommodation is needed to complete any part of the job application, interview process, or onboarding please use this Form to request an accommodation.

Okta is committed to complying with applicable data privacy and security laws and regulations. For more information, please see our Privacy Policy at https://www.okta.com/privacy-policy/.