Principal Software Engineer - Developer Platform (Auth0)

Okta; Toronto; On-site; CAD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity (where applicable)

Bonus

Health, dental, and vision insurance

RRSP with match

Healthcare spending

Telemedicine

Paid leave (PTO and parental leave)

Job summary

Okta is hiring a Principal Engineer for the Developer Platform team to lead architectural decisions and scale the platform that powers developers and agents. You will own the platform's direction, tackle complex challenges, and mentor engineers to uphold technical excellence.

In this role you will drive cross-team alignment, champion reliability, and shape interfaces that stay coherent as usage grows. The position is hybrid with strong collaboration across engineering, product, and architecture

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with principal or staff level impact.
• Extensive work designing high-scale backend and event-driven systems.
• Platform thinking with developer-facing interfaces and abstractions.
• Deep understanding of identity and access management (IAM) concepts.
• Ownership of ambiguous problems and guiding teams to clear direction.

Responsibilities

• Own the platform architecture and set technical direction for the developer platform.
• Architect for scale: design distributed systems for throughput and reliability.
• Turn vague platform problems into clear modular designs for the team.
• Design for developers and agents, enabling both to build and automate work.
• Raise the engineering bar through deep, constructive reviews.
• Collaborate across teams to keep the platform aligned.

Skills

10+ years software eng

Distributed architecture

Platform thinking

IAM platform

Node.js

Go

Agent/LLM tooling

Tools

Node.js

Go

Job description

Secure Every Identity, from AI to Human

Identity is the key to unlocking the potential of AI. Okta secures AI by building the trusted, neutral infrastructure that enables organizations to safely embrace this new era. This work requires a relentless drive to solve complex challenges with real-world stakes. We are looking for builders and owners who operate with speed and urgency and execute with excellence.

This is an opportunity to do career-defining work. We're all in on this mission. If you are too, let's talk.

Get to know the team

The Developer Platform team at Auth0 (an Okta company) owns the platform that developers build identity on. Increasingly they build alongside AI agents, and that raises the bar on everything underneath: interfaces have to hold up whether a person or an agent is calling them, and the systems behind them have to stay reliable and coherent as usage grows. We move fast, we own problems end to end, and we care deeply about the platform we put in front of the developers and agents who depend on it.

The opportunity

We're hiring a Principal Engineer (P5) to serve as the technical leader and compass for the Developer Platform team. You'll work across the breadth of the platform, tackling the highly complex, vaguely specified problems that span it and turning them into clear technical direction the team can execute against, without day-to-day oversight. Above all, you'll own how the platform is architected to scale: the distributed systems behind it, the reliability and consistency guarantees developers depend on, and the coherence that keeps it easy to build on as usage grows. You'll champion the team's technical execution, raise the engineering bar, mentor the people around you, and partner with tech leads across teams to keep the wider platform aligned. You'll have real influence over how our platform holds up in a world where developers and agents are both first-class consumers.

What you'll be doing

• Own the platform architecture: Set the technical direction for the developer platform, and make the cross-cutting decisions that keep it coherent and easy to build on as it grows.
• Architect for scale: Design the distributed systems behind the platform for throughput, reliability, and consistency, so the guarantees developers depend on hold up under real load.
• Turn ambiguity into direction: Take the hardest, most vaguely specified platform problems and turn them into clear, modular technical designs the team can execute against.
• Design for developers and agents: Shape the platform so it holds up whether a person or an agent is calling it, and so both can build and automate their work against Auth0.
• Raise the engineering bar: Set the standard for how the team designs, builds, and operates the platform, and lead deep, constructive reviews that grow the engineers around you.
• Partner across teams: Operate peer-to-peer with tech leads in adjacent groups to review major architectural decisions and keep the wider platform aligned.

What you'll bring

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record as a Principal or Staff level individual contributor.
• Distributed architecture depth: Extensive experience designing and operating high-scale, reliable backend and event-driven systems, with a strong grasp of the tradeoffs in throughput, consistency, and failure handling.
• Platform thinking: A track record of designing and shipping platforms or developer-facing systems at scale, with an instinct for the interfaces and abstractions that keep them coherent as they grow.
• IAM platform thinking: Deep understanding of identity and access management, with a sense for the platform capabilities and abstractions that make identity easier for developers to build on.
• Ownership in ambiguity: You can own vaguely specified problems and drive them to a clear technical direction without heavy top-down scoping.
• Strong engineering fundamentals: Strong Node.js fundamentals; Go a plus.
• Agent-aware design: Hands‑on familiarity with agentic tooling, MCP, or LLM‑facing design, and a sense for how agents consume a platform.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Experience working across engineering, product, and architecture in a fast-moving environment, and a habit of raising the bar for the people around you.

Extra credit

• Work with agent frameworks, AI-facing systems, or developer toolchains in the LLM space.
• A background at a company where developers are the primary customer.
• Experience setting technical direction for a platform that other engineering teams build on.

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Below is the annual salary range for candidates located in Canada. Your actual salary will depend on factors such as your skills, qualifications, and experience. In addition, Okta offers equity (where applicable), bonus, and benefits, including health, dental, and vision insurance, RRSP with a match, healthcare spending, telemedicine, and paid leave (including PTO and parental leave) i