Cloud Infrastructure Architect, Okta Federal

What You'll Be Doing

• Define and own Okta's Cloud Platform architecture — establish reference architectures, design standards, and guardrails that bring consistency, security, and reliability to workloads running across the business.
• Lead the architecture for Kubernetes and EKS — design and evolve our cluster strategy, multi-tenancy model, networking topology, and security posture as the platform scales to support AI agent workloads and diverse business unit deployments.
• Elevate Okta's AI platform — partner with AI architects and platform engineers to evolve our agent and model-serving infrastructure from its current state to a production-grade, scalable platform capable of supporting broad business adoption.
• Drive multi-cloud strategy — build the evaluation framework and decision criteria for when and how Okta leverages AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud; ensure workload placement is intentional and optimized for performance, cost, and capability.
• Serve as the technical anchor for the Cloud Platform Engineering team — raise the architectural quality of everything the team designs and builds as we complete the transformation from account vending to a managed platform model.
• Partner cross-functionally with AI, security, and productivity architects, product managers, and business unit stakeholders to ensure cloud infrastructure decisions align with Okta's product, compliance, and operational requirements — including support for federal programs and FedRAMP environments.
• Partner cross-functionally to design cloud-native solutions that can be effectively adapted for air-gapped, self-hosted environments like US Secret (SIPRNet) and US Top Secret (JWICS).
• Help architect and validate foundational Kubernetes and infrastructure designs within unclassified AWS GovCloud sandboxes. Ensure these commercial-side designs translate seamlessly when tested against emulators that simulate the strict constraints of air-gapped networks.
• Ensure our commercial cloud platform architecture shares foundational DNA with our highly regulated deployments, aligning with DoD-centric frameworks like the USAF's "Big Bang" architecture and utilizing Iron Bank hardened containers where applicable.

What You'll Bring to the Role

• 10+ years of hands-on cloud infrastructure experience with deep, demonstrated expertise in one or more major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure) — including compute, networking, storage, IAM, and managed services at enterprise scale; AWS experience is preferred.
• Proven experience designing and operating Kubernetes and EKS at scale — cluster architecture, multi-tenancy patterns, networking (CNI, service mesh), security hardening, and day-2 operations.
• Experience architecting infrastructure for AI and machine learning workloads — GPU compute, model serving, data pipeline infrastructure, and the security and access patterns that go with them.
• Demonstrated experience making intentional cloud provider placement decisions — evaluating workloads against provider capabilities, cost profiles, compliance requirements, and existing organizational footprint.
• Strong cloud security background — IAM design, network segmentation, secrets management, policy-as-code, and experience with compliance frameworks (SOC 2, FedRAMP, or equivalent).
• Solid understanding of enterprise identity and access management patterns — including federated identity, SSO, and SCIM — and experience integrating cloud workloads and platform services with identity providers such as Okta.
• Infrastructure-as-code fluency — Terraform, AWS CDK, or equivalent; experience building and maintaining reusable, modular IaC at enterprise scale.
• Demonstrated ability to influence without authority — experience driving architectural alignment across engineering, security, product, and business stakeholders.
• Security Clearance: Active U.S. TS/SCI with polygraph.

Extra Credit

• Experience designing or operating cloud infrastructure for FedRAMP authorized environments or federal programs.
• Designing infrastructure for completely air-gapped networks, Sovereign Clouds, or DoD Impact Level 6/7 environments.
• Hands-on experience building or operating AI agent platforms — orchestration frameworks, vector databases, model routing, or inference optimization.
• FinOps experience — cloud cost governance, chargeback models, commitment-based discount strategies, and rightsizing at scale.
• Platform engineering for internal developer platforms (IDP) — developer self-service, golden paths, and guardrails.
• Service mesh technologies such as Istio or Linkerd in production Kubernetes environments.
• Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKS, CKAD) or AWS certifications (Solutions Architect Professional, Security Specialty).
• Familiarity with cloud-native security operations platforms such as Google SecOps (Chronicle) — including log ingestion architecture, data residency considerations, and GCP IAM integration patterns.
• Familiarity with DoD/IC DevSecOps reference architectures and networking, specifically traversing boundaries via cross-domain solution (CDS) and deploying DevOps tools like "Big Bang" via Iron Bank hardened containers.