Staff AI Security Engineer

Location: Bellevue, Washington; Chicago, Illinois; New York, New York; San Francisco, California; Washington, DC

Department: Sec - Vulnerability Management & Sec Arch-772

The Staff AI Security Engineer Opportunity

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.

At Okta, we’re building the future of secure, enterprise-grade AI Agents. We’re looking for a Staff AI Security Engineer to join our dedicated Security team. In this role, you will define the technical vision, architecture, and hands-on security controls for AI models, agentic workflows, and autonomous systems across Okta. This is a senior individual contributor role for a hands-on engineer who can design scalable AI security infrastructure, mentor engineers, and partner with cross-functional teams to build secure "paved roads" for AI innovation.

What you’ll be doing 

• Secure AI Implementations: Design and deploy enterprise AI guardrails, gateways, and other controls to protect our agentic workflows from emerging threats
• Agent Hardening & Sandboxing: Establish security architectures for local and hosted agents to mitigate tool-calling, prompt injection, goal misalignment, and data exfiltration risks.
• Define Paved Roads & Security Standards: Develop secure design patterns and developer tools that allow engineering teams to build and deploy AI features safely and quickly.
• Threat Modeling for AI Workflows: Lead threat modeling and security reviews for agentic AI systems, enterprise deployments, and agent ecosystems.
• AI Discovery & Visibility: Build systems to discover, inventory, and assess AI usage and data flows across the enterprise.
• Agentic Platform Infrastructure: Design and operate internal AI security platforms and develop integrated AI capabilities that automate complex security operations.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Drive technical alignment across product, security, and infrastructure teams. Mentor engineers and security practitioners across domains

What you’ll bring to the role

• AI Security Expertise: Deep knowledge of the AI threat landscape, including OWASP, MITRE ATLAS, NIST AI RMF with practical experience prompt injection, excessive agency, and other AI-related threats.
• Software Engineering: 8+ years of experience in security engineering or backend software development, with strong coding proficiency in Python or Go and hands-on cloud experience.
• Agentic Framework Knowledge: Experience securing or auditing agentic frameworks (such as LangChain, Strands, Claude Agent SDK, or custom tool-calling agents) operating within sandboxed environments.
• Architectural Expertise: Proven ability to design scalable cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), API gateways, proxy architectures, and access controls for enterprise systems.
• Paved Road Construction: Track record of building developer-first security tools and platform controls that maintain engineering velocity.
• Technical Leadership: Strong communication skills with a history of driving technical strategy, influencing engineering leaders, and mentoring engineers.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Security, or equivalent practical experience

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