Senior Software Engineer, Performance ( Toronto)

Okta is The World's Identity Company. We free everyone to safely use any technology - anywhere, on any device or app. Our Identity as a Service solution enables secure yet flexible access, authentication, and automation that transforms how people move through the digital world, putting Identity at the heart 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.

The Engineering Opportunity

Okta's Workforce Identity Cloud secures billions of global logins every day. The Platform Scalability team within the Resilience organization owns the speed, efficiency, and scale of Okta's core authentication and authorization service. We analyze and optimize system behavior across every layer of the stack - from virtualized hardware and the JVM, through MySQL query execution, caching, and the edge, up to cloud components (AWS/GCP) and application code - and we build the frameworks that keep the platform fast and protected for thousands of organizations and millions of daily active users.

We are seeking a Senior Back-End Software Engineer to help own the scalability, efficiency, and service protection of our expanding Identity as a Service platform.

You will build traffic-shaping and service-protection frameworks (rate limiting, concurrency limits, query timeouts, read isolation), create tooling and automation that makes latency and resource bottlenecks easy to find, and dig into production metrics to understand how the system behaves under real customer traffic. While SRE and Database Reliability Engineering keep the service up and running, the Platform Scalability team keeps it fast and efficient - and we partner closely with them to get there.

Because we own monitoring of system latency, throughput, and resource utilization, this is not a heads-down coding role: keeping an eye on system health is part of the regular rhythm of the job, alongside project work and deep-dive investigations.

We value iterative development, automated testing, and individual ownership. Join our creative, fast-paced team to work on impactful projects at serious scale.

Job Duties and Responsibilities

• Design and implement backend frameworks that protect and optimize critical system resources, including rate limiting, traffic shaping, concurrency controls, and query timeout enforcement.
• Monitor production latency, throughput, and resource utilization across the database, application, cache, and edge layers; create and maintain meaningful metrics, dashboards, and alerts, often through automated tooling.
• Analyze latency and scalability bottlenecks end-to-end - JVM profiling, thread and heap analysis, SQL query plans, slow logs, and Hibernate behavior - and drive fixes in code, SQL, and configuration.
• Perform capacity and cost-efficiency analysis (for example, determining whether databases and compute are right-sized for current load), participate in weekly metrics reviews, and support onboarding of large customers and high-traffic events.
• Advise engineering teams on scalable, efficient feature design; review pull requests and SQL changes for latency, resource, and scale impact and recommend tuning or refactoring.
• Actively explore and integrate modern AI-driven developer tooling, automated diagnostics, and intelligent monitoring to accelerate latency and capacity investigations, automate analysis of metrics and logs, and reduce toil.
• Write high-quality unit and functional tests and participate in design and code reviews to keep the engineering bar high.
• Participate in on-call rotations handling latency and scale-related customer escalations, rate limit requests, and production incidents; contribute to Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and long-term mitigations.
• Collaborate closely with SRE, Database Reliability Engineering, Architects, QA, Product Owners, and Customer Support to deliver secure and dependable software.

Minimum Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• 5+ years of experience as a software developer with strong knowledge of Java or a similar language, including a solid understanding of JVM internals, garbage collection, and concurrency.
• Strong experience with relational databases - preferably MySQL and Hibernate - including query optimization, indexing, execution plan analysis, and schema design.
• Proven experience diagnosing and resolving latency, throughput, and scaling bottlenecks in high-availability, multi-tenant SaaS environments.
• Hands-on experience with profiling and observability tools (e.g., Java Flight Recorder, async-profiler, thread/heap dump analysis, Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus/Grafana or similar).
• Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred, or GCP/Azure) and modern container ecosystems (Docker, Kubernetes).
  
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