Overview
Okta is building a world where anyone can safely use any technology. Within Okta Platform R&D, we focus on safeguarding the future of work by delivering simple and secure access for people and organizations everywhere. Our aim is to protect the identities of our customers' workforce and users while exploring what more we can enable.
Location: Chicago, IL
Role overview
As a Product Design Architect, you will serve as the lead designer for the entire Okta platform. You will ensure all products work together as a cohesive, simple, and secure experience. You will define the design vision, establish company-wide standards, and influence high level strategy alongside executive leadership. While Principal Product Designers own the UX strategy within product and portfolio areas, you will own the design architecture that connects them at the Okta-wide level, setting the innovation agenda, establishing standards across portfolios, and ensuring that Okta's products define what great identity experiences look like, both inside our organization and in the industry.
This role sits at the intersection of design craft and strategic leadership. You will work across R&D organizations, partnering with product and engineering leadership to make decisions that have broad, lasting impact on how millions of users navigate, understand, use, and trust Okta's products.
Finer print
This role shapes the highest-order design strategy across Okta's full product portfolio. You will lead company-wide discovery efforts and work hand in hand with product leadership and executive teams to translate business ambitions into compelling, human-centered product visions.
You will establish best practices and raise design fluency across the entire Research & Development organization. You will help refine the structural design decisions that product teams build within the platform-level IA, cross-product navigation models, shared interaction paradigms, and the design governance processes that ensure those standards hold over time.
You will do this through a combination of deep craft work (architecture maps, journeys and user flows, design standards), strategic facilitation (cross-org alignment, design reviews), and active mentorship of the senior and principal designers who look to you for direction. You won't be embedded in a single product area; you'll be the connective tissue across all of them.
In this role you will get to
- Communicate inspiring, forward-looking visions of the future for Okta and our customers that energize teams and attract talent
- Drive company-wide efforts that improve our ability to scale design solutions for the largest and most complex global customers
- Facilitate strategic sessions with senior leadership and executive teams and serve as an advocate for our customers at the most senior levels
- Influence company strategy and help define Okta's position in the market by contributing design perspective to the highest-level product and business conversations
- Set an example for how we best use AI across to ship high quality designs and evangelize those approaches across Engineering, Product, and Design
- Enable execution across the company by aligning teams around company-level goals and design standards
- Collaborate with senior leadership to define the future of AI at Okta
- Actively work to uplevel design fluency across the entire company, not just the Product Design team, so that more of Okta thinks and builds with design quality as a baseline
- Mentor designers at any level; be a standard-bearer for Okta's core values and for industry best practices
- Be an early adopter of new methods in design, including AI-assisted workflows. Form an opinion about evolving design methods and practices, and help the organization adopt those new methods
- Stay deeply attuned to competitor products, UX trends, and emerging technology, and bring those insights into the organization in ways that create competitive advantage
Who we are looking for
- You are an industry expert. Your work, your thinking, and your reputation extend beyond any single company, and you have experience with designing for enterprise scale and for identity security.
- You bring an AI-first mindset, demonstrated by practical experience using various AI tools in your daily design workflows.
- You bring a company-wide, systems-level perspective; you see across the entire product portfolio and identify the connective tissue that makes Okta's suite coherent and powerful
- You are a strategic thought partner to product leadership and executive teams, who seek your perspective on hard problems and trust your judgment on design direction
- You have a proven ability to lead and facilitate design thinking at the executive level, translating abstract business goals into actionable, human-centered design strategies
- You create new organizational and operational standards that outlast any individual deliverable
- You are an effective external voice for Okta Design: you can represent Okta at a conference, contribute a byline, or appear on a podcast and make the design community want to work here.
- You have exceptional communication skills and can distill the most complex concepts into clear, inspiring narratives for any audience, from an individual contributor to the C-suite
- You share our values, and work in accordance with those values
Qualifications
- Degree in a related field or relevant work experience as a Product Designer
- 15+ years of experience as a Product Designer, with a significant portion of that time operating at a senior or principal level across large, complex product portfolios
- Demonstrated proficiency in leveraging AI-powered design tools and plugins within your workflow
- Proficient in Claude Code, Figma, Miro, and/or similar design and facilitation tools
- Possess at least a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS/JavaScript/React
