Principal Software Engineer – Developer Platform (Auth0)
Principal Software Engineer (P5) leading the Developer Platform team at Auth0 (Okta), responsible for architecting scalable distributed systems, setting technical direction, and ensuring the platform scales for both human and AI agent usage.
- Compensation
- CA$184K–CA$253K / yr
- Location
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with a proven track record as a Principal or Staff level individual contributor
- Distributed architecture depth: Extensive experience designing and operating high-scale, reliable backend and event-driven systems
- Platform thinking: A track record of designing and shipping platforms or developer-facing systems at scale
- IAM platform thinking: Deep understanding of identity and access management
- Ownership in ambiguity: Ability to own vaguely specified problems and drive them to clear technical direction
- Strong engineering fundamentals: Strong Node.js fundamentals; Go a plus
- Agent-aware design: Hands-on familiarity with agentic tooling, MCP, or LLM-facing design
- Cross-functional collaboration: Experience working across engineering, product, and architecture in a fast-moving environment
Full description
**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.
Get to know the team
The Developer Platform team at Auth0 (an Okta company) owns the platform that developers build identity on. Increasingly they build alongside AI agents, and that raises the bar on everything underneath: interfaces have to hold up whether a person or an agent is calling them, and the systems behind them have to stay reliable and coherent as usage grows. We move fast, we own problems end to end, and we care deeply about the platform we put in front of the developers and agents who depend on it.
The opportunity
We're hiring a Principal Engineer (P5) to serve as the technical leader and compass for the Developer Platform team. You'll work across the breadth of the platform, tackling the highly complex, vaguely specified problems that span it and turning them into clear technical direction the team can execute against, without day-to-day oversight. Above all, you'll own how the platform is architected to scale: the distributed systems behind it, the reliability and consistency guarantees developers depend on, and the coherence that keeps it easy to build on as usage grows. You'll champion the team's technical execution, raise the engineering bar, mentor the people around you, and partner with tech leads across teams to keep the wider platform aligned. You'll have real influence over how our platform holds up in a world where developers and agents are both first-class consumers.
What you'll be doing
- Own the platform architecture: Set the technical direction for the developer platform, and make the cross-cutting decisions that keep it coherent and easy to build on as it grows.
- Architect for scale: Design the distributed systems behind the platform for throughput, reliability, and consistency, so the guarantees developers depend on hold up under real load.
- Turn ambiguity into direction: Take the hardest, most vaguely specified platform problems and turn them into clear, modular technical designs the team can execute against.
- Design for developers and agents: Shape the platform so it holds up whether a person or an agent is calling it, and so both can build and automate their work against Auth0.