Engineering Manager

Okta is looking for an Engineering Manager for its elite and high-impact engineering team in India focused on customer success. Customer Centric Engineering team delivers customer success by bridging the gap between customer support and engineering via troubleshooting, debugging, proposing fixes and resolving the most complex customer issues escalated by our last tier of Technical Support. As a Manager, you will drive cross-functional response to critical technical incidents, act as a quarterback and customer advocate within R&D, and represent the Technology organization to customers and our Support organization. This role will also be a champion for development of internal troubleshooting tools for various teams.

You will require the abilities of both Technical Support and Software Development: to act as an interlink as well as be able to understand the overall Okta infrastructure. You get a seat at the table to represent and drive engineering for customer success. The ideal candidate will share our passion and great pride in customer-first culture.

Job Duties and Responsibilities:

•  Act as a perfect bridge between the Engineering teams and the Support teams representing the Customers.
• Lead and mentor a team of CCE engineers, fostering a diverse, collaborative and positive environment focused on solving customer challenges and reconciling competing priorities. Encourage continuous learning, provide constructive feedback, and create career development plans for your team members.
• A thought leader with a proven track record of championing customer success within engineering with a keen sense of balance of strategic and tactical solutions.
• Collaborate with Engineering teams, Technical Support, Customer Success and other stakeholders to effectively drive customer escalations to resolution. Proficient in providing executive summary to the leadership team on issues.
• Be a liaison with Customer Success teams to engage on customer calls to represent engineering or prepare Engineering executives before calls.
• Advocate for customers within engineering teams and drive continuous improvement by providing regular feedback to cross-functional leaders around product, tooling & process improvements.
• Address complex technical challenges with a customer-first approach, finds joy in understanding our product, architecture and effectively maps it to escalations.
• Apply a data-driven approach to track metrics, measure success and make informed decisions for the CCE and extended Engineering teams and also for the Customers. Identify opportunities to propose and manage development of new troubleshooting or automation tools for operational efficiency.
• Participate-in and also manage on-call weekly rotation outside regular working hours (once in a month) including weekends (once in 3 months).

Requirements:

• Experience: 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3+ years in Engineering Management role.
• Technical Expertise: Strong knowledge of modern software development practices, programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, JavaScript, etc.), cloud technologies, multi-tenant environments and software architecture patterns. Familiarity with microservices and distributed systems is a plus.
• Customer-Centric Mindset: Passion for understanding and solving customer problems. Experience in integrating customer feedback into the development process.
• Leadership Skills: Proven ability to lead and inspire teams, managing diverse personalities and fostering an inclusive, collaborative work culture. Deep organizational capabilities, especially in regards to influence, collaboration and communication.
• Communication Skills: Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly convey technical concepts in a simple, precise and effective manner and advocate for customer needs.
• Agile & Lean Knowledge: Experience working in agile environments, daily standups,  ideally with a solid understanding of Kanban methodologies.
• Problem-Solving & Decision Making: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a focus on making data-driven decisions that benefit both the customer and the business.

Nice To Have: Experience in the Identity space is a definite plus. Experience in working in a similar Customer Centric Engineering role is a plus.