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Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI

Join Okta as a Senior Software Engineer to build autonomous agents for identity operations and security.

Location
San Francisco, California, United States
Compensation
$165k–$226k/yr
Level
senior
Type
full time · On-site

Posted by employer 1 day ago

First seen on Joblaze 3 hours ago

Last verified on the company career page 3 hours ago

What you'll build

  • Build the agent harness for planning and tool use
  • Integrate OpenAI and Anthropic model APIs
  • Evaluate existing harnesses and build missing pieces
  • Build evaluation datasets and replay tests
  • Measure false positives and completion rates

Must have

  • Strong Python engineering skills
  • Experience shipping an LLM application
  • Hands-on experience building agent workflows
  • Experience integrating model APIs

Nice to have

  • Open-source contributions
  • Fine-tuning and model distillation experience
  • Identity and security workflows experience

AI in the day-to-day

Integrate OpenAI and Anthropic model APIs for building AI software.

Not disclosed in this posting: years of experience, visa sponsorship.

Benefits

401k Match Equity/Stock Options Health Insurance Parental Leave

Joblaze summary

In this role, the Senior Software Engineer focuses on developing and refining autonomous agents for identity operations and security at Okta. Key skills include strong Python programming, experience with AI model integration, and a background in building agent workflows or evaluation systems. This position is ideal for someone with a proven track record in shipping AI applications and a deep understanding of agent execution and evaluation. The team operates with the agility of a startup while leveraging the resources of a well-established public company.

Joblaze insights

  • Listed today — first seen on Joblaze October 17, 2026. Last confirmed on Okta's careers page October 17, 2026.
  • Salary band is below the typical range for AI/ML roles (median ~$190,450).
  • Starts above 24% of 198 comparable senior ai/ml roles in United States that list Python we track (median $182,000 across 69 companies). See Python salary trends
  • Python appears in 52.8% of 530 comparable senior ai/ml roles in United States; Anthropic appears in 0.4% of 530 comparable senior ai/ml roles in United States.

Quick facts

Is the Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI role remote?
No — this is an on-site role in San Francisco, California, United States.
What's the salary range?
Okta lists $165,000–$226,000 for this role.
Where is the role based?
Okta is hiring for this position in San Francisco, California, United States.
What's the tech stack?
Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: AWS Step Functions, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Anthropic, FastAPI, OpenAI, PostgreSQL.
What seniority level is this role?
Okta targets senior candidates for this position.
Is this full-time or contract?
Full-time for this Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI role at Okta.

From the original posting

Secure Every Identity, from AI to Human

The Senior Software Engineer Opportunity

The team that built Jeeva AI is building Digital Workers, a new suite of autonomous agents for identity operations and security inside Okta. The team works directly with Todd McKinnon, Okta's co-founder and CEO, with the opportunity to bring this product to Okta's 20,000+ customers. You will help shape the product with the ownership and pace of a startup and the resources of a public company.

You will build the harnesses and evaluations that make these workers reliable. They investigate risk, use tools, wait for approvals and complete tasks across enterprise systems. Bring depth in agent execution or model quality and help turn it into working software customers can trust.

About You

Production builder: You have shipped AI software and know what changes when real users depend on it.

Careful evaluator: You investigate failures and use evidence to judge quality.

Strong owner: You follow an improvement through code, evaluation, release and customer use.

What you will be doing

  • Build the agent harness for planning, tool use, memory, context compaction, interruption and recovery during long-running work.
  • Integrate OpenAI and Anthropic model APIs. Select models using measured quality, latency and cost, with clear failure handling.
  • Evaluate existing harnesses and build only the missing pieces. Keep the harness connected to AWS workflow execution and approval state.
  • Keep authorization and sensitive writes behind application policy checks. Require evidence of the resulting state before marking work complete.
  • Build evaluation datasets and replay tests for valid findings, access decisions, app setup and AI agent onboarding.
  • Measure false positives, missed risks, unsafe actions, completion rate and cost. Turn production failures into regression tests.
  • Test prompt injection, stale evidence, conflicting instructions and unsafe tool use. Protect tenant boundaries in retrieval and memory.
  • Improve prompts, retrieval, tools and model routing. Evaluate fine-tuning or other post-training methods when results justify them and data use is approved.

What you will bring to the role

  • Strong Python engineering skills and experience shipping an LLM application that uses tools.
  • Hands-on experience building agent workflows or evaluation systems for tool-using LLM applications. For harness work, relevant experience includes Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI Codex SDK, Strands Agents, LangChain Deep Agents, LangGraph or a custom implementation.
  • Experience integrating model APIs, structured outputs and asynchronous services. Experience with OpenAI or Anthropic is especially relevant.
  • Depth in agent execution or evaluation systems, with working code and failure analysis you can explain.
  • Ability to distinguish a plausible model response from a supported finding or verified action.

Scope by level

Senior: Own an agent capability or evaluation pipeline with measurable improvements.

Our stack

Our core stack is Python FastAPI, AWS Step Functions, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS and pgvector. OpenAI and Anthropic model APIs are part of the integration plan.

We plan to add an agent harness and a dedicated analytics layer using ClickHouse or BigQuery. The harness choice is open. Experience with equivalent tools also counts.

And extra credit for

  • Open-source contributions, agent observability, security evaluations or synthetic evaluation data.
  • Fine-tuning, preference data, post-training evaluation or model distillation using approved datasets.
  • Identity and security workflows. Foundation-model research experience is optional.

P26065

#LI-Inperson

#LI-BB1

Below is the annual base salary range for candidates located in San Francisco Bay Area. Your actual base salary will depend on factors such as your skills, qualifications, experience, and work location. In addition, Okta offers equity (where applicable), bonus, and benefits, including health, dental and vision insurance, 401(k), flexible spending account, and paid leave (including PTO and parental leave) in accordance with our applicable plans and policies. To learn more about our Total Rewards program please visit: https://rewards.okta.com/us.

The annual base salary range for this position for candidates located in the San Francisco Bay area is between:
$165,000—$226,000 USD

The Okta Experience

Standard company text repeated across Okta's postings is omitted here.

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