Staff Data Engineer - Defensive Cyber Engineering

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.

Core Responsibilities

Data Ingestion & Processing

• 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.

Data Quality, Observability & Governance

• 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.

Advanced Security Analytics & Automation

• 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.

Collaboration & Continuous Improvement

• 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.

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:

• 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.

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