Seven Years at Okta, Briefly

2 min read

After a little over seven years, I left Okta last month. Here’s a quick look back.

I joined in July 2018 to run the EMEA Technical Operations SRE team. For most of that time my teams were keeping Okta’s identity platform running for hundreds of thousands of organisations and millions of users, with billions of authentications a month going through it.

Roughly how it went:

  • 2020: I became Engineering Site Lead for the London office, shortly before everyone started working from home.
  • 2020–2021: I took on a product role as well as managing SRE, first as a Product Owner and then as a Product Architect. I wrote a bit about doing both back in 2021.
  • 2021: I started managing our new Infrastructure Automation team too.
  • 2023–2025: As Director of SRE I ran teams across four continents: Infrastructure Automation, EMEA SRE and the SRE team for ISPM (Spera). I also owned DR & BCP, infrastructure security and our compliance implementations.

Compliance took up a lot of my time, with PCI, HIPAA, FedRAMP Moderate and High, and IL4 all in the mix. I wrote about one of the stranger parts of that in 2023.

The mantra from my 2020 post held up for the five years after it. At Okta’s scale the “prefer software to people” part mattered most. We couldn’t have run the platform without a lot of automation.

I’m not sure what’s next yet. When I am, I’ll write about it here.