Staff Software Engineer, AI-Core (Federal)

ABOUT THE ROLE Okta is seeking a skilled software engineer to join the AI-Core Team, where you will play a critical role in building a scalable Agentic AI platform. This platform will enable agents to run real engineering work, write code, triage incidents, and automate various workloads across Okta's infrastructure. As a member of this team, you will own the hard cross-cutting problems, including agent identity, delegated access, secure isolated execution, orchestration, and governance, at the scale and reliability bar that infrastructure demands. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a software engineer on the AI-Core Team, you will design and implement backend APIs and services that make up the Agentic platform. Your responsibilities will include: - Building the agent identity and machine-to-machine authentication system, including credential management and delegated access flows - Developing the agent knowledge base and memory layer so agents retain context within and across sessions - Creating the observability layer for agents: tracing, cost tracking, audit logs, and dashboards that make agent behavior debuggable in production - Building the governance and safety layer: policy enforcement on tool calls, content filtering, PII protection, and human-in-the-loop approval flows - Developing the orchestration layer that coordinates multi-step agent workflows with state persistence and error recovery - Collaborating with Product, SRE, Security, Data Platform, Observability, and other domain partners to shape what each layer looks like and how it integrates with the broader Okta platform WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you should have: - 5+ years of software engineering experience building production backend systems - 1+ years of exposure to AI/ML or agentic applications, whether through 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 what can go wrong at integration points; familiarity with OAuth, OIDC, or other modern auth patterns - Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where the problem definition evolves alongside the solution and the right abstractions are still being invented WHY REMOTE As a remote employee, you will have the opportunity to work on novel and high-ownership problems that the industry is still figuring out. You will learn fast and have room to shape how you grow, whether that means going deeper on backend systems, leaning into AI/ML, or moving toward technical leadership over time. You will also build things that actually get used, with the platform you ship being the foundation for other teams to build their agents on. BENEFITS Okta offers an annual base salary range for candidates located in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as equity (where applicable), bonus, and benefits, including health, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k), and more.