Staff AI/ML Analytics Engineer

Okta•Bellevue, WA

50d•$154,000 - $259,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Okta is seeking a Staff AI/ML Analytics Engineer to join our Data & Insights team. This role is a mission-critical position responsible for defining and owning the metadata and semantic layer of our data products that power AI/ML use cases, ensuring clean, trusted, and well-modeled data that powers analytics and AI/ML across the company. As a Staff Analytics Engineer, you will play at the intersection of data engineering, analytics, and applied AI/ML, defining business logic, join paths, and metric frameworks while also enabling AI/ML systems to understand and respond to user intent. You will partner with product, engineering, data science, and business stakeholders to deliver reliable data products that drive decision-making and improve prompt outcomes. This role is ideal for someone who can go deep on data modeling and technical architecture, while also thinking strategically about how data and AI/ML come together to create scalable solutions with impact on business growth.

Requirements

Experience: 8+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, analytics engineering, or applied AI/ML, with demonstrated leadership at the staff level.
Technical Depth: Expertise in SQL and semantic layer technologies (e.g., LookML, dbt, Cube, AtScale, or equivalent). Strong background in dimensional modeling, ELT pipelines, and metric frameworks.
AI Analytics Acumen: Hands-on experience with large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, and natural language to SQL/metric translation.
Business Partnership: Proven ability to partner with non-technical stakeholders to translate business requirements into robust data solutions.
Communication Skills: Strong ability to simplify and explain complex data/AI concepts to diverse audiences.
Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
Experience with metadata-driven data governance frameworks.
Background in SaaS, security, or identity industries.

Responsibilities

Own and Evolve the Semantic Layer: Design and manage the semantic layer for Okta's Enterprise data and analytics products, including data models, labeling, and integrations.
Define Business Logic and Metrics: Establish join paths, calculations, and metric definitions that ensure consistent, trusted reporting across the company.
Translate User Intent into Data Structures: Build systems that map natural language queries to model-friendly structures, enabling AI/ML analytics to deliver accurate results.
Iteratively Improve Prompt Outcomes: Analyze, tune, and refine how our AI/ML systems interpret and respond to user queries, creating feedback loops for continuous improvement.
Metric Definition Understanding: Ensure metrics and semantic layer are understandable and explorable through development documentation and data catalog.
Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Partner with data engineers, analytics leads, technology teams, and business stakeholders to deliver scalable, AI/ML-driven data solutions.
Champion Best Practices: Set standards for semantic modeling, metric governance, and AI/ML analytics integration across the organization.
Mentor and Influence: Provide thought leadership to peers and junior engineers, fostering a culture of excellence, curiosity, and data-driven innovation.