Director, AI Takeoff Engineering

Socket.dev; Bellevue (WA); On-site; USD 246,000 - 378,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity (where applicable)

Bonus

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Job summary

Okta is seeking a driven Director of Engineering for the AI Takeoff team to accelerate roadmap delivery and deliver customer-focused AI capabilities at scale. You will lead a high-autonomy engineering group, partner with product, design, and enterprise customers, and own the technical strategy across security, reliability and production readiness.

You will operate like a startup within a larger enterprise, moving quickly while ensuring quality, scalability, and strong cross-functional

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and shipping identity, security, infrastructure or developer-focused products in a high-growth organization.
• Proven engineering leadership and team management experience, including hiring, developing and motivating high-performing teams.
• Strong executive communication and influencing skills, with a track record of driving outcomes across organizational boundaries and bringing cross-functional teams together.
• Proven experience working directly with enterprise customers and translating customer problems into technical solutions.
• Deep identity domain expertise — you know, or can quickly get up to speed on, the latest identity protocols, standards, architectures and patterns.
• Experience operating in high-ambiguity, high-velocity environments where priorities evolve quickly and execution matters.
• Strong product and customer orientation, with the ability to balance customer urgency, technical quality and long-term scalability.
• Experience with AI/agentic systems, AI security or emerging identity patterns is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with our top customers and AI Forward Deployed Engineering to rapidly translate customer needs into differentiated AI capabilities and deliver them to production.
• Partner closely with broader Okta Engineering, Product and Design to ensure capabilities are production-ready and meet Okta standards for security, reliability, scalability and quality.
• Build, grow and mentor a small, highly focused team of AI Takeoff engineers operating with high autonomy and urgency.
• Serve as a senior technical SME in customer engagements, technical evaluations and complex sales processes.
• Lead complex customer escalations with a bias toward rapidly identifying root causes and delivering durable solutions.
• Own the technical strategy, architecture, and execution for the AI Takeoff engineering roadmap, balancing customer urgency with long-term scalability and production quality.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Team management

Executive communication

Enterprise customer engagement

Identity domain expertise

High-velocity environments

Product/customer orientation

AI security knowledge

Job description

Okta is seeking a driven Director of Engineering for the AI Takeoff team to accelerate roadmap delivery and deliver customer-focused AI capabilities at scale. You will lead a high-autonomy engineering group, partner with product, design, and enterprise customers, and own the technical strategy across security, reliability and production readiness.

You will operate like a startup within a larger enterprise, moving quickly while ensuring quality, scalability, and strong cross-functional