Staff Software Engineer, AI Platform & Infrastructure

Okta•San Francisco, CA

17h

About The Position

Okta’s team that built Jeeva AI is developing Digital Workers, a suite of autonomous agents for identity operations and security. The team works directly with Okta’s co-founder and CEO and aims to bring the product to Okta’s 20,000+ customers. This role helps shape the product with startup-like ownership and pace, backed by the resources of a public company. The engineer will build backend services and AWS infrastructure that keep Digital Workers running, including services, connectors, workflow execution, data systems, and production reliability. The work includes writing Python services and infrastructure code that allow workers to make approved changes and preserve evidence. The role involves developing and operating reliable distributed backend systems, including APIs, durable workflows, analytics, data infrastructure, and safeguards for customer data and external-system changes. Scope depends on level: Senior engineers own a backend or platform component; Staff engineers lead a domain across teams; and Principal engineers establish shared platform contracts and foundational services.

Requirements

Experience building and operating production backend or distributed systems, with strong coding skills in Python or a comparable language.
Hands-on AWS experience with APIs, queues, containers, networking, IAM, and databases.
Strong SQL and data modeling skills.
Experience diagnosing database performance and asynchronous system failures.
Experience with infrastructure as code, deployment automation, observability, and production incident response.
Sound judgment about customer data, tenant isolation, credentials, and safe changes to external systems.

Nice To Haves

Experience with ClickHouse, BigQuery, or comparable analytics systems, event ingestion, and usage metering.
Multi-tenant SaaS, OAuth, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, or enterprise connector development experience.
Experience deploying agent frameworks, including Claude Agent SDK, Codex SDK, Strands Agents, Deep Agents, or LangGraph.
Prior identity experience; it is optional.

Responsibilities

Build Python FastAPI services, data models, and reusable connectors for Okta, AWS, ServiceNow, and enterprise applications.
Implement durable execution using Step Functions, SQS, and EventBridge, handling approval waits, rate limits, duplicate events, and safe retries.
Manage PostgreSQL schemas, indexes, query performance, and pgvector retrieval.
Enforce tenant isolation across APIs, storage, and credentials.
Build model API access for OpenAI, Anthropic, and supported AWS paths, including credentials, quotas, timeouts, and cost controls.
Add an analytics pipeline for worker events, traces, tokens, findings, and verified outcomes; evaluate ClickHouse and comparable systems such as BigQuery.
Create reliable usage records and reconciliation, ensuring retries, duplicate findings, and incomplete work are not counted as new outcomes.
Build deployment pipelines, infrastructure as code, observability, and safe release controls across development, staging, and production.
Implement scoped write services, kill switches, audit retention, and backup recovery.
Test failures and verify that sensitive changes actually took effect.
Own a backend or platform component, including deployment, tests, and production operation, at the Senior level.
Lead a domain such as execution, tenant security, data infrastructure, or reliability across teams at the Staff level.
Set shared backend and platform contracts, resolve system tradeoffs, and implement foundational services at the Principal level.