Principal Data Engineer, Product Data

Okta is hiring a Principal Data Engineer on the Data and Insights team to architect, build, and maintain scalable data solutions for product and user behavior analytics. This role focuses on making data more reliable and easier to use across global product teams through stronger data quality, governance, modeling standards, and dependable reference architectures.

Okta’s Data Engineering team is on a mission to accelerate Okta’s scale and growth by building platforms utilized across the organization. With AI growing across Okta’s products and business, the company’s data is increasingly critical to success. You will work closely with Product Engineering to ensure valuable user behavior is captured efficiently and at scale, enabling insights that support adoption and growth.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and evolve high-scale data solutions that serve as the organization’s reference architecture and simplify data access across teams.
• Develop data quality frameworks, monitoring, anomaly detection, and alerting, with governance, lineage tracking, and change management rigor appropriate for externally reported numbers.
• Drive adoption of consistent data modeling patterns, naming conventions, documentation norms, and metric governance standards across the data organization.
• Lead cross-functional technical initiatives across data verticals to accelerate delivery and harden data systems.
• Navigate ambiguity and make sound technical decisions, balancing short-term delivery with long-term infrastructure investment.
• Champion Data Contracts by implementing data contracts and schema evolution practices to ensure reliability across global product teams.
• Mentor and scale: raise the technical bar by mentoring senior engineers, leading cross-functional task forces, and fostering a culture of engineering excellence and data-driven decision making.
• Stay current with the evolving data landscape and advocate for emerging technologies and practices to guide long-term technical direction.

What you bring

• 10+ years in a data engineering role, with proven experience in a senior or lead capacity. Experience with Federal government compliance and security requirements is highly desirable.
• Deep expertise in product behavioral data engineering, including telemetry data for structured product launch analysis, feature usage, retention, and other product lifecycle metrics.
• Proven experience partnering with Product Engineering teams on successful instrumentation for data collection.
• Expert-level hands-on experience with SQL, ETL/ELT tools (Airflow, dbt), and MPP databases (Snowflake, Redshift). Extensive hands-on experience with AWS services including S3, Lambda, EMR, ECR, and EKS.
• Deep experience designing and working with lakehouse architectures (Databricks) and modern file formats including Iceberg and Delta.

How you’ll work with the team

Okta is the leading independent identity provider. The Technology, Data, and Intelligence (TDI) organization is the engine that powers Okta’s global workforce by providing the technology and systems that enable employees to do their best work.

Tech stack you’ll use

SQL, Airflow, dbt, Snowflake, Redshift, Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon EMR, Amazon ECR, Amazon EKS, Databricks, Iceberg, Delta.

Okta experience

• Supporting Your Well-Being
• Driving Social Impact
• Developing Talent and Fostering Connection + Community

Your journey begins with an immersive, in-person onboarding experience designed to accelerate your impact and connect you to Okta’s mission and team from day one.

Location: Washington, DC (hybrid). Salary: USD 197,000 - 270,600 per year.