Director, Defensive Cyber Engineering

Director, Defensive Cyber Engineering

The Okta Security team’s mission is to strengthen Okta’s position as the leading Identity-as-a-Service solution through identifying and resolving risks to the employees, product, and most importantly, our customers. With the ever-increasing pace of cloud application adoption, companies are struggling to find ways to accurately assess risk and act at the speed of their business.

In addition to driving security in our Corporate environment and Okta service, the Security team is deeply entrenched in the Okta business. As such, we contribute to product roadmaps, branding, research and other strategic aspects of our 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

We are seeking a highly experienced technical leader to be responsible for leading a team of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and Date Engineers to build and optimize Okta’s security data pipelines, threat intelligence, incident response, and automated defense capabilities. You will define the vision and strategy for security data engineering and infrastructure, ensuring that Okta’s security operations have reliable access to the data and tools needed to detect, investigate, and respond to threats effectively.

This is a high-impact leadership role that requires both technical depth and strategic thinking. You will work closely with security leadership to drive innovation, improve efficiency, and ensure that Okta remains at the forefront of cyber defense.

The successful candidate will report directly to the VP of Cyber Defense in Okta’s Security team. 

Core Responsibilities

Leadership, Collaboration & Strategy

• Define and execute the technical vision and roadmap for Defensive Cyber Engineering, aligning with the broader Cyber Defense strategy.
• Lead and grow a team of Data Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), providing mentorship and career development opportunities.
• Drive collaboration between security, cloud engineering, and data platform teams to build a world-class security data infrastructure.
• Stay ahead of emerging threats, security technologies, and industry trends to continuously improve detection and response capabilities.

Security Data Engineering & Analytics

• Oversee the development of scalable, high-performance data pipelines to process security logs and telemetry from across Okta’s environment.
• Ensure the reliability, integrity, and accessibility of security data for use in threat detection, investigations, and security analytics.
• Work with security operations, threat intelligence, and insider threat teams to develop advanced analytics and machine learning models for detecting threats.
• Establish data governance, schema management, and quality assurance to ensure clean, structured, and actionable security data.

Security Infrastructure & Reliability Engineering

• Lead the design and implementation of resilient, scalable security platforms that support detection, response, and investigation workflows.
• Ensure high availability and performance of the security data lake, log aggregation, case management, threat intelligence, forensic analysis, and security automation platforms.
• Oversee security observability initiatives, ensuring that security teams have real-time insights into system health and operational status.
• Improve incident response automation, integrating security orchestration and automation capabilities. 

Operational Excellence & Continuous Improvement

• Define and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) for security data pipeline health, system reliability, and automation efficiency.
• Implement best practices for infrastructure as code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-native security engineering.
• Drive automation efforts to reduce operational toil, improve efficiency, and enhance security response capabilities.
• Conduct post-incident reviews to drive lessons learned and continuous improvements in security tooling and detection capabilities. 

What does it take?

You’re a leader. People want to work with you and for you. You know what it takes to build world-class threat intelligence, detection, response, and investigative tooling and you’re passionate about helping make ours stronger. 

You’re a team player. You have great communications skills and a thirst for knowledge. You understand the motivations of malicious actors and how they seek to target and compromise modern zero trust environments and platforms and cloud environments. You’re experienced and passionate about building the systems and tools required for Cyber Defense programs to succeed and you’re excited at the prospect of doing so in a company that protects millions of users’ online lives every day. You’re security-minded but also pragmatic, and have a demonstrated ability to weigh and measure risk appropriately. You’re calm under pressure and have a good internal compass for taking calculated risks. 

Requirements

• A degree in a relevant field would be beneficial but is not required. We value real-world experience and demonstrable skills in software engineering, systems development, and data platforms engineering.

• Minimum of 8 years of relevant experience, with a proven track record of successfully building and maintaining tools and infrastructure to support Cyber Defense capabilities, particularly with regards to detection and response platforms.
• Ability to handle sensitive information with a high degree of integrity and discretion.