Staff Software Engineer, AI-Core (Federal)
About The Position
Identity is the key to unlocking the potential of AI. Okta secures AI by building the trusted, neutral infrastructure that enables organizations to safely embrace this new era. This work requires a relentless drive to solve complex challenges with real-world stakes. We are looking for builders and owners who operate with speed and urgency and execute with excellence. This is an opportunity to do career-defining work. We're all in on this mission. If you are too, let's talk. The AI-Core Team is building a scalable Agentic AI platform for agents that run real engineering work, agents that write code, triage incidents, investigate alerts, remediate vulnerabilities, upgrade libraries, patch flaky tests, automate runbooks, and other workloads across Okta's infra. Owning this platform means owning the hard cross cutting problems: agent identity, delegated access, secure isolated execution, orchestration, and governance, at the scale and reliability bar that Infra demands. The work is novel and high ownership, and the candidate should be drawn to problems the industry hasn't solved yet.
Requirements
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building production backend systems.
- 1+ years of exposure to AI/ML or agentic applications, whether through production work, side projects, or hands-on experimentation.
- Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages (Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Go, or similar)
- Hands-on experience designing and operating distributed systems: APIs, microservices, container orchestration, and serverless technologies
- A security-conscious mindset around credential handling, trust boundaries, and what can go wrong at integration points; familiarity with OAuth, OIDC, or other modern auth patterns.
- Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where the problem definition evolves alongside the solution and the right abstractions are still being invented.
- The employee must be either a U.S. citizen as defined in 42 U.S. Code § 9102; a natural person who is a lawful permanent resident as defined in 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(20) or who is a protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3); or a U.S. national (i.e. includes citizens and non-citizens born in outlying possessions such as American Samoa and Swains Island), green card holders, refugees, and asylees. Working on a U.S. visa does NOT qualify as a U.S. person.
Nice To Haves
- Exposure to LLM integration, RAG pipelines, MCP, or agent orchestration frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, or the Claude/OpenAI SDKs.
- Experience with policy-as-code authorization (Cedar, OPA), agent identity patterns, or building developer-facing APIs and SDKs.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement backend APIs and services that make up the agentic platform
- Build the agent identity and machine-to-machine authentication system, including credential management and delegated access flows
- Build the agent knowledge base and memory layer so agents retain context within and across sessions
- Build the observability layer for agents: tracing, cost tracking, audit logs, and dashboards that make agent behavior debuggable in production
- Build the governance and safety layer: policy enforcement on tool calls, content filtering, PII protection, and human-in-the-loop approval flows
- Build the orchestration layer that coordinates multi-step agent workflows with state persistence and error recovery
- Collaborate with Product, SRE, Security, Data Platform, Observability and other domain partners to shape what each layer looks like and how it integrates with the broader Okta platform
Benefits
- equity
- bonus
- health, dental and vision insurance
- 401(k)
- flexible spending account
- paid leave (including PTO and parental leave)
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
