Staff Software Engineer (Applied AI)

Location: San Francisco, California; in-person onboarding is required

Annual base salary: $194,000–$267,000 USD for candidates located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Company

Okta provides identity and security infrastructure for organizations and is developing autonomous AI agents for identity operations.

What you will do

• Build agent harnesses for planning, tool use, memory, context compaction, interruption, recovery, and long-running execution.
• Integrate OpenAI and Anthropic model APIs and select models based on quality, latency, cost, and failure handling.
• Connect agent harnesses to AWS workflow execution and approval state.
• Enforce authorization and application policy checks, requiring evidence of resulting state before completing work.
• Build evaluation datasets, replay tests, and analytics for findings, access decisions, application setup, and agent onboarding.
• Test prompt injection, stale evidence, conflicting instructions, unsafe tool use, and tenant-boundary protection.

Requirements

• Strong Python engineering skills and experience shipping LLM applications that use tools.
• Hands-on experience building agent workflows or evaluation systems for tool-using LLM applications.
• Experience integrating model APIs, structured outputs, and asynchronous services, especially OpenAI or Anthropic.
• Depth in agent execution or evaluation systems, including working code and failure analysis.
• Ability to distinguish plausible model responses from supported findings or verified actions.
• Staff-level ownership of a domain such as harnesses, evaluations, or model quality.

Nice to have

• Open-source contributions, agent observability, security evaluations, or synthetic evaluation data.
• Experience with fine-tuning, preference data, post-training evaluation, or model distillation.
• Experience with identity and security workflows or foundation-model research.

Culture & Benefits

• Startup-like ownership and execution pace with the resources of a public company.
• Direct opportunity to shape products used by Okta’s 20,000+ customers.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k), flexible spending account, paid time off, and parental leave.
• Equity and bonus opportunities where applicable.
• In-person onboarding designed to connect new hires with the mission and team.