Manager, Customer Identity, Security Engineering

Get to know Okta

Okta is The World’s Identity Company. We free everyone to safely use any technology—anywhere, on any device or app. Our Workforce and Customer Identity Clouds enable secure yet flexible access, authentication, and automation that transforms how people move through the digital world, putting Identity at the heart of business security and growth.

At Okta, we celebrate a variety of perspectives and experiences. We are not looking for someone who checks every single box - we’re looking for lifelong learners and people who can make us better with their unique experiences.

Join our team! We’re building a world where Identity belongs to you.

The Role

We seek a technical, hands-on Security Engineering Manager to build and lead a security engineering team within Auth0 Customer Identity that secures how we build and use AI. The team's work spans two areas. The first is building security tooling and controls for AI, including gateways and guardrails that secure the use of MCP servers, LLMs, agents, and the systems around them. The second is architecting and reviewing the security of our AI products, working shift-left with engineering and product teams so that security is built in from the start of design instead of added afterward.

This role leads a single team embedded within the Customer Identity product unit and works across Product, Engineering, and the broader Okta Security organization to turn AI security guidance into shipped controls, supporting the growth of our global Customer Identity business.

We are an engineering-focused organization that seeks to stay on the cutting edge of security technology and the AI threat landscape. In this role you will set direction for a team that doesn't just advise on AI risk — it builds the gateway, guardrails, and tooling that enforce secure AI usage, and reviews AI systems early enough to shape their design.

You will lead a globally distributed group of talented engineers who share a passion for security and enjoy solving complex problems at scale. This role works closely with and alongside the broader Okta Security team in support of Okta's company-wide security strategy and Okta’s Secure Identity Commitment.

This is a player-coach role. You will stay hands-on: designing and prototyping, writing and reviewing code, challenging architectures, and earning the respect of strong engineers, while also hiring, growing, and retaining your team and shaping its roadmap.

Responsibilities:

• Hire, lead, coach, and develop a globally distributed team of security engineers (Senior through Staff), building a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and pragmatic security
• Define and execute a multi-quarter roadmap for the team, aligned with Customer Identity business goals and Okta's company-wide security strategy, balancing gateway engineering with security review demand
• Lead the design and delivery of an internal AI gateway that secures internal AI traffic — including agent, MCP, and LLM access — with authentication and authorization, policy enforcement, guardrails, auditing, and observability
• Be hands-on in the team's technical work: contribute to architecture, prototypes, and code, and set the engineering bar for the team
• Run an AI security review practice, similar to product security, that assesses AI-enabled features, services, models, and agent/MCP integrations through intake, threat modeling, design review, and actionable remediation guidance
• Review and build security controls for AI systems, addressing risks such as prompt injection, insecure tool and agent permissions, data leakage, excessive agency, model and supply-chain risk, and abuse of agentic protocols (MCP, A2A)
• Turn recurring review findings into reusable, secure-by-default controls, libraries, and patterns that engineering teams can adopt without a security engineer in the loop
• Manage the intake and prioritization of AI security review requests, and decide what the team takes on, defers, or declines in line with capacity
• Partner across Product, Engineering, and Identity Security leadership to embed AI security into the development lifecycle
• Own and influence high-impact AI security architecture decisions across Auth0 and Okta Customer Identity infrastructure
• Communicate risk, progress, and trade-offs clearly to senior leadership, and turn technical findings into clear guidance for engineering and product teams
• Manage team health, prioritization, and delivery across remote, distributed time zones

What this position is not:

• A purely people-management role without technical depth
• Compliance-focused or policy-only AI governance leadership
• Owning reactive patch and vulnerability management as a primary function

Requirements:

• You have 3+ years of experience managing security or software engineering teams, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers
• You have 8+ years of experience in security engineering, with a strong foundation in cloud infrastructure and/or product security
• You have a hands-on development background in Golang and Node.js, and you remain hands-on, sufficient to design and build micro-services, evaluate prototypes, and contribute code to security tooling and the AI gateway
• You have hands-on experience with AI/ML security — attacking, defending, or both (e.g., LLM/prompt-injection attacks, agentic-system or model abuse, adversarial ML) — and an interest in building controls, not just assessing risk
• You have experience performing product security or application security reviews, including threat modeling and architecture/design review, ideally applied to AI/LLM-based systems
• You have working knowledge of the AI agent / MCP ecosystem and its security implications, and of building secure API or gateway/proxy infrastructure (authentication, authorization, policy enforcement, rate limiting, auditing)
• You have working knowledge and hands-on experience with one or more of the following:
• AWS and/or Azure security
• Kubernetes
• You have strong knowledge of OWASP security standards and frameworks (including the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications) and secure coding best practices
• You have a strong foundation in secure software development lifecycle best practices
• You have a proven record of setting technical vision, defining multi-quarter strategy, driving architectural consensus, and influencing cross-organizational security initiatives
• You have strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to turn technical findings into clear guidance for engineering, product, and executive audiences
• You have experience leading a globally distributed and remote team across multiple time zones

Bonus points if:

• You have built or led teams building an AI/LLM gateway, proxy, or guardrail platform in a production environment
• You have built or led teams building AI/ML-powered security tooling or defensive automation in a production environment
• You have published security research, CVEs, or conference talks in AI/ML security or identity security
• You have working knowledge and experience with one or more of the following:
• Adversarial ML, model red-teaming, or AI safety research
• Identity and access management, including workload and agent identity
• Full-stack engineering
• Site reliability engineering
• Governance, risk and compliance

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