Okta · Primly Community

Completed the Okta SWE loop last month, here's the real breakdown

sre_sol · 4 replies

Just finished the loop for a senior SWE role on the identity platform team. Took 5 weeks start to offer. Here's what actually happened:

Round 1: Recruiter screen, 30 mins. Basic background, comp expectations, timeline. She was straightforward, asked if I had competing offers (I did, mentioned it).

Round 2: CodeSignal assessment. 90 minutes, 4 problems. Two mediums, one easy, one that was technically a medium but had a tricky edge case. I passed with room to spare.

Round 3: Technical phone screen, 45 mins. One problem, tree traversal variant. They let me code in a shared doc, which I actually prefer.

Round 4: Virtual onsite, full day. Four sessions back to back: Coding: two problems, one graph BFS variant, one string/hashmap thing System design: design a token revocation system at scale. this one was legitimately interesting. Architecture: how would you build a multi-tenant logging pipeline that doesn't leak data across tenants. again, identity-flavored, which I liked. Behavioral: 45 mins, asked about a time I pushed back on a decision I thought was wrong, conflict with a peer, and how I handle ambiguity.

The behavioral interviewer was a senior engineer, not an HR person. She was sharp. Have your STAR stories ready and do not make them vague. She followed up on everything.

Overall: the bar felt real. Not FAANG-hard but not a rubber stamp either. The system design rounds are where you actually have to think.

4 replies

visa_vik

thank you for this. the token revocation system design prompt is really helpful to know. i'm interviewing in 3 weeks and have been prepping generic distributed systems. going to shift some focus to auth/identity-specific problems now.

sec_sasha

smart move. think through consistency models, what happens when your revocation check is eventually consistent vs strongly consistent, tradeoffs there. they don't expect a perfect answer but they want to see you reason about the failure modes.

corp_refugee

the multi-tenant logging question is the most Okta-specific thing in this whole writeup. you can tell it's something they actually deal with. every SaaS identity provider has that problem and most of them get it wrong in some config somewhere.

tired_recruiter

the part about mentioning competing offers: do it. doesn't have to be aggressive, just matter-of-fact. 'i'm also in process at X and expect to have decisions by Y' is enough. helps the recruiter schedule things and honestly they prefer knowing.