Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering; Federal

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.

Okta's Federal Operations team supports government customers operating in FedRAMP-authorized, IL4, and IL5 environments. We deliver the same 99.999% availability promise to the federal market while meeting the strict security, compliance, and operational requirements that come with it. We're looking for a technical leader who understands both the SRE discipline and the unique demands of federal customer relationships - someone who can hold a technical conversation with an agency ISSO in the morning and unblock an incident bridge with an engineering team in the afternoon.

As Senior Manager of Federal SRE Operations, you will own the operational health of Okta's federal environments, lead a team of engineers working within compliance-governed change processes, and serve as a trusted point of contact for federal security stakeholders.

What you'll be doing

• Lead and grow a team of SREs operating Okta's FedRAMP High, IL4, and IL5 environments, ensuring reliability and compliance obligations are met simultaneously.
• Serve as the primary operational relationship manager for federal agency security leaders - including Authorizing Officials (AOs), ISSOs, and ISSMs - translating technical SRE practices into language and posture appropriate for federal oversight.
• Own the continuous monitoring program for Okta's federal boundary: coordinate POA&M remediation, drive vulnerability SLA compliance, and represent operational risk posture in ATO reviews.
• Partner with Okta's Gov Cloud product and security teams to ensure infrastructure changes go through FedRAMP-compliant change management processes without sacrificing velocity.
• Drive incident response and post-incident review processes that satisfy federal reporting obligations (e.g., FISMA incident notification timelines) while improving system reliability.
• Manage cross-functional relationships with 3
  
  PAOs, federal agency security teams, and internal compliance, legal, and security stakeholders during audits, ATO renewals, and security assessments.
• Maintain operational runbooks, system security plans (SSPs), and evidence packages that reflect the true state of the environment - not just what audit season requires.
• Accelerate the federal engineering team's velocity by building compliant self-service tooling, automation, and CI/CD pipelines that reduce the friction of operating in a restricted environment.
• Lead, mentor, and grow engineers across the federal SRE organization, including setting career paths that bridge deep federal compliance knowledge with modern SRE practices.

What you'll bring to the role

• 5+ years of experience in technical leadership and people management, with at least 3 years in a federal or regulated environment (FedRAMP, DoD, IC, or equivalent).
• Demonstrated experience managing relationships with federal security stakeholders - AOs, ISSOs, agency CISOs, or equivalent - not just writing documentation for them.
• Working knowledge of NIST SP 800-53, FedRAMP authorization frameworks, FISMA reporting requirements, and DISA STIGs.
• Experience operating large-scale cloud infrastructure in FedRAMP-authorized environments (AWS Gov Cloud preferred); IL4/IL5 experience a strong plus.
• Strong background in SRE or platform engineering fundamentals:
  Kubernetes, IaC (Terraform), CI/CD, observability, and incident management.
• Ability to hold compliance and reliability in tension - understanding when a change needs to go through a CAB and when a P1 incident requires you to move faster and document after.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills; comfortable presenting operational risk and reliability posture to non-technical federal security officials.
• Experience supporting or leading FedRAMP ATO processes, continuous monitoring programs, or FISMA annual assessments.
• U.S. Citizenship required (see below).
• Active or current eligibility for a federal security clearance (Secret or above) is a plus and may be required for certain program support.

Additional requirements:

• This position requires the ability to access federal environments and/or have access to protected federal data. As a condition of employment for this position, the successful candidate must be able to submit documentation establishing U.S. Person status (e.g. a U.S. Citizen, National, Lawful Permanent Resident, Refugee, or Asylee. 22 CFR 120.15) upon hire.

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Below is the annual base salary range for candidates located in California (excluding San Francisco Bay Area),…