In San Francisco, Okta’s AI-Core initiative is building a scalable, agentic AI platform designed to handle real engineering workloads across the infrastructure. This onsite Staff Software Engineer role focuses on designing and delivering robust backend systems that enable secure agent identity, governance, and observability, enabling agents to operate safely and efficiently at scale.
Overview
Location: San Francisco, CA (onsite). Salary: USD 194,000 - 267,000 per year. Minimum experience: 1 year.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement backend APIs and services that compose the agentic platform
- Build the agent identity and machine-to-machine authentication system, including credential management and delegated access flows
- Develop the agent knowledge base and memory layer so agents retain context within and across sessions
- Create the observability layer for agents: tracing, cost tracking, audit logs, and dashboards for production debugging
- Establish the governance and safety layer: policy enforcement on tool calls, content filtering, PII protection, and human-in-the-loop approval workflows
- Develop 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 layer interfaces and integration with the broader Okta platform
Requirements
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building production backend systems
- 1+ years of exposure to AI/ML or agentic applications, from 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 integration points; familiarity with OAuth, OIDC, or other modern auth patterns
- Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where problem definitions evolve alongside solutions and the right abstractions are still being invented
Technologies
- Python
- TypeScript/Node.js
- Go
- LangChain
- LangGraph
- Claude/OpenAI SDKs
- Cedar
- OPA
- OAuth
- OIDC
Benefits
- Supporting Your Well-Being
- Driving Social Impact
- Developing Talent and Fostering Connection + Community
The Okta Experience
- Supporting Your Well-Being
- Driving Social Impact
- Developing Talent and Fostering Connection + Community
The AI-Core Team
The AI-Core team is building a scalable Agentic AI platform that enables agents to perform real engineering work, including writing code, triaging incidents, investigating alerts, remediating vulnerabilities, upgrading libraries, patching flaky tests, and automating runbooks across Okta's infrastructure. Owning this platform means tackling cross-cutting challenges such as agent identity, delegated access, secure isolated execution, orchestration, and governance at an Infra-grade scale and reliability.
Eligibility
The role requires that the candidate be a U.S. citizen, a lawful permanent resident, a protected individual, or a U.S. national. Working on a U.S. visa does not satisfy the U.S. person requirement.
