Staff Software Engineer (AI-Core)

Location: Hybrid in San Francisco, California; candidates must be eligible U.S. persons

Annual base salary: $194,000–$267,000 USD, plus potential equity, bonus, and benefits.

Company

Okta builds identity and security infrastructure that helps organizations safely adopt AI and protect access to digital services.

What you will do

• Design and implement backend APIs and services for a scalable agentic AI platform.
• Build agent identity, machine-to-machine authentication, credential management, and delegated access flows.
• Develop knowledge, memory, observability, tracing, cost tracking, audit logging, and dashboard capabilities.
• Build governance and safety controls including policy enforcement, content filtering, PII protection, and human approval flows.
• Develop orchestration for multi-step agent workflows with state persistence and error recovery.
• Collaborate with Product, SRE, Security, Data Platform, and Observability partners.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building production backend systems.
• At least 1 year of exposure to AI/ML or agentic applications.
• Strong proficiency in Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Go, or a similar backend language.
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems, APIs, microservices, container orchestration, and serverless technologies.
• Security-focused experience or knowledge involving credential handling, trust boundaries, OAuth, OIDC, or comparable authentication patterns.
• Must qualify as a U.S. person; working on a U.S. visa does not qualify.

Nice to have

• Experience with LLM integration, RAG pipelines, MCP, LangChain, LangGraph, or Claude/OpenAI SDKs.
• Experience with policy-as-code authorization, Cedar, OPA, agent identity patterns, or developer-facing APIs and SDKs.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on novel agentic systems and secure execution problems that are still emerging in the industry.
• Opportunity to shape the platform used by other teams to build production agents.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k), flexible spending account, PTO, and parental leave according to applicable plans and policies.
• Immersive in-person onboarding and a global community spanning more than 20 offices.

Hiring process

• Reasonable accommodation is available during the application, interview, and onboarding process.