Principal Software Engineer, SecureAI

Toronto · CAD 184,000-253,000 / year · 10+ years experience · Hybrid · Posted Oct 2, 2026

At a glance

The Okta for AI Agents Team is building the future of digital identity management. The way companies are using agents and allowing them access is undergoing a fundamental shift, enabling teams to move fast while staying secure.
Our North Star is clear: To get AI right, you have to get identity right. We are not just managing identities; we are building the industry's first Identity Security Fabric for the agentic era. As organizations rapidly deploy AI, these non-human entities are acting with access to critical tools, often bypassing traditional perimeters and creating a 'Shadow AI' crisis. Our mission is to move identity from a reactive gatekeeper to a unified control plane, transforming AI risk into business ROI.
We are tackling this by implementing a comprehensive four-pillar maturity model: Discover, Onboard, Protect, and Govern. We are driving innovation by defining the standards for Agentic Identity—including pioneer work with securing AI Agents and support for protocols like MCP. You will be helping us build the infrastructure that allows enterprises to scale AI safely, ensuring every access decision—whether made by a human or an automated agent—is authenticated, authorized, and audited at scale.
We are a diverse team of engineers, product managers, and designers who are bringing Okta’s expertise in identity to define the future of Agent Identity management, focusing on enablement while staying secure.

As a Principal Software Engineer on the Agent Access Policies sub-team in Okta Secures AI, you will serve as the technical leader and compass for the team.
You will work across the breadth of the platform, turning vaguely specified, complex problems into clear technical directions without day-to-day oversight.
You will own how the platform is architected to scale, champion technical execution, raise the engineering bar, and mentor those around you.

Set the technical direction for the Agent Access Policies framework, and make cross-cutting decisions to keep it coherent as it grows.
Design the distributed systems behind the platform for throughput, reliability, and consistency under real load.
Take the hardest, most vaguely specified platform problems and turn them into clear, modular technical designs.
Shape the platform so it holds up whether a person or an agent is calling it, allowing both to build and automate work against Okta for AI Agents.
Set the standard for how the team designs, builds, and operates the platform, and lead deep, constructive reviews to grow engineers.
Operate peer-to-peer with tech leads in adjacent teams to review major architectural decisions and keep the wider platform aligned.
Drive continual evolution in the adoption of AI-native development practices, helping the team rethink software design, reviews, and shipping.
Proactively identify and prioritize tech debt, driving improvements in CI/CD, observability, documentation, reliability, and support processes.
Partner with Product and Design to understand and own desired customer outcomes.
Actively invest in the growth of peer engineers and raise the technical bar of the team as a whole.

10+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record as a Principal or Staff level individual contributor.
Extensive experience designing and operating high-scale, reliable backend and event-driven systems with a strong grasp of tradeoffs in throughput, consistency, and failure handling.
Ability to own vaguely specified problems and drive them to a clear technical direction without heavy top-down scoping.
Experience working across engineering, product, and architecture in a fast-moving environment.
Proven experience defining scalable backend architectures and integrating complex APIs with modern web technologies, including making decisions with lasting org-wide impact.
Solid understanding of web authentication and authorization fundamentals, auth flows, and best practices for securing sensitive user data.
Deep expertise in building reliable, secure, enterprise-grade software in Java or another type-safe language.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

Prior experience leading a team of engineers through a meaningful shift in ways of working around AI adoption, developer tooling, or engineering culture change
Experience with identity, authorization, or IAM protocols (e.g., OAuth, OIDC, SAML)
Hands-on familiarity with agentic tooling, MCP, or LLM-facing design