Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI

Location: San Francisco, California, United States

Annual base salary: $165,000–$226,000 USD

Company

Okta builds identity and security infrastructure that helps organizations safely use AI and manage access across enterprise systems.

What you will do

• Build agent harnesses for planning, tool use, memory, context compaction, interruption, and recovery during long-running tasks.
• 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 while evaluating existing systems and filling capability gaps.
• Implement authorization and policy checks for sensitive writes and require evidence before marking tasks complete.
• Build evaluation datasets, replay tests, and analytics for access decisions, risk findings, application setup, and agent onboarding.
• Test prompt injection, unsafe tool use, stale evidence, conflicting instructions, and tenant-boundary issues; convert production failures into regression tests.

Requirements

• Strong Python engineering skills and experience shipping an LLM application that uses 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.
• Senior-level ownership of an agent capability or evaluation pipeline with measurable improvements.

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 using approved datasets.
• Experience with identity and security workflows or foundation-model research.

Culture & Benefits

• Startup-style ownership and execution within a public-company environment.
• In-person onboarding designed to accelerate impact and build connections.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k), flexible spending account, equity where applicable, bonus, PTO, and parental leave.
• Connection and collaboration across a global community spanning more than 20 offices.