Principal AI Security & Identity Engineer

Okta Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 224,000 - 308,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus

Health/dental/vision insurance

401(k)

Job summary

Okta Inc. in San Francisco seeks a Principal Software Engineer to architect scalable AI-powered identity tools and lead critical production systems across security and automation.

You will build agent harnesses, integrate model APIs, and drive evaluation pipelines with startup pace yet corporate resources. The role demands ownership, strong Python engineering, and experience shipping real-world AI software.

Qualifications

• Shipped AI software with real user impact.
• Experience building agent workflows or evaluation systems.
• Experience integrating model APIs (OpenAI/Anthropic).

Responsibilities

• Build the agent harness for planning, tool use, memory, context compaction, interruption and recovery during long-running work.
• Integrate OpenAI and Anthropic model APIs. Select models using measured quality, latency and cost, with clear failure handling.
• Evaluate existing harnesses and build only the missing pieces. Keep the harness connected to AWS workflow execution and approval state.
• Keep authorization and sensitive writes behind application policy checks. Require evidence of the resulting state before marking work complete.
• Build evaluation datasets and replay tests for valid findings, access decisions, app setup and AI agent onboarding.
• Measure false positives, missed risks, unsafe actions, completion rate and cost. Turn production failures into regression tests.
• Test prompt injection, stale evidence, conflicting instructions and unsafe tool use. Protect tenant boundaries in retrieval and memory.
• Improve prompts, retrieval, tools and model routing. Evaluate fine-tuning or other post-training methods when results justify them and data use is approved.

Skills

Python

Agent workflows

Model APIs

Evaluation systems

OpenAI/Anthropic

Tools

LangChain

AWS Step Functions

PostgreSQL

Job description

Okta Inc. in San Francisco seeks a Principal Software Engineer to architect scalable AI-powered identity tools and lead critical production systems across security and automation.

You will build agent harnesses, integrate model APIs, and drive evaluation pipelines with startup pace yet corporate resources. The role demands ownership, strong Python engineering, and experience shipping real-world AI software.