Staff Backend Software Engineer, SecureAI

About Okta Secures AI Team

The Okta for AI Agents Team is building the future of digital identity management. The way companies are using agents and allowing them access is undergoing a fundamental shift, enabling teams to move fast while staying secure.

Our North Star is clear: To get AI right, you have to get identity right. We are not just managing identities; we are building the industry's first Identity Security Fabric for the agentic era. As organizations rapidly deploy AI, these non-human entities are acting with access to critical tools, often bypassing traditional perimeters and creating a 'Shadow AI' crisis. Our mission is to move identity from a reactive gatekeeper to a unified control plane, transforming AI risk into business ROI.

We are tackling this by implementing a comprehensive four-pillar maturity model: Discover, Onboard, Protect, and Govern. We are driving innovation by defining the standards for Agentic Identity—including pioneer work with securing AI Agents and support for protocols like MCP. You will be helping us build the infrastructure that allows enterprises to scale AI safely, ensuring every access decision—whether made by a human or an automated agent—is authenticated, authorized, and audited at scale.

We are a diverse team of engineers, product managers, and designers who are bringing Okta’s expertise in identity to define the future of Agent Identity management, focusing on enablement while staying secure.

About the role

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Okta Secures AI team, your mission is to build the industry's first Identity Security Fabric for the agentic era. You will be working on the designs and driving of our unified control plane features, ensuring that we operationalize our North Star: "To get AI right, you have to get identity right."

As a staff engineer, you will actively design, build, and maintain robust backend services. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems and a commitment to AI-native engineering as our standard. You will rethink backend design, validation, and delivery through AI-augmented workflows, ensuring our platform provides secure, interoperable, and scalable access—enforcing the principle of least privilege for every agent action.

What you’ll be doing

• Proactively shape the technical strategy of the Identity Security Fabric, partnering with leadership to prioritize the work streams for securing AI Agents.
• Build the Runtime Policy Decision Point (PDP). Implement the request-time authorization engine at the Agent Gateway and at the agent to resource connection level to intercept and evaluate every agent request against per-agent, per-tool, and per-resource rules.
• Design and support authoring from a policy engine like Cedar, schema validation, and evaluation—connecting the admin console's no-code UI builder output with direct API-published policies.
• Develop the logic to validate which users a delegated agent is permitted to represent and securely forward the acting user's identity to downstream resources.
• Track and shape MCP, OAuth token exchange, and agent identity specifications. Feed lessons learned from production back into the specs and their reference implementations.
• Develop Comprehensive Audit Logging. Build secure logging mechanisms to record the outcome of every request (allow or deny) along with the specific rule or reason behind the decision.
• Drive continual evolution in the adoption of AI-native development practices, helping the team rethink how we design, review, and ship software with AI as a core part of the workflow.
• Proactively identify and prioritize tech debt; drive improvements in areas beyond feature work - CI/CD, observability, documentation, reliability, and support processes.
• Partner with Product and Design to understand and own the desired customer outcome, not just the technical deliverable.
• Actively invest in the growth of peer engineers, taking responsibility for raising the technical bar of the team as a whole.

What you’ll bring to the role

• Operates well beyond basic AI tool usage - understands how to apply AI meaningfully across the full software development lifecycle, can evaluate and adopt new AI tooling with good judgment, and is able to establish practices and bring a team along.
• Proven experience defining scalable backend architectures and integrating complex APIs with modern web technologies - including the ability to make and defend architectural decisions with lasting org-wide impact.
• Solid understanding of web authentication and authorization fundamentals - how auth flows work, and best practices for securing sensitive user data.
• Architectural expertise: Proven experience defining scalable backend architectures and integrating complex APIs with modern web technologies, including making decisions with lasting, org-wide impact.
• Backend proficiency: Deep expertise in building reliable, secure, enterprise-grade software in Java or another type-safe language.
• Prior experience leading a team of engineers through a meaningful shift in ways of working - whether around AI adoption, developer tooling, or engineering culture change is a strong plus.

Extra credit

• Experience with identity, authorization, or IAM protocols (e.g., OAuth, OIDC, SAML)
• Work with agent frameworks, AI-facing APIs, or developer toolchains in the LLM space

Education and Experience:Bachelor’s or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

P25940

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