Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI

San Francisco · USD 165,000-226,000 / year · Posted Oct 15, 2026

At a glance

The Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI will join a team building Digital Workers, a suite of autonomous agents for identity operations and security. This role involves working directly with Okta's CEO to develop reliable AI agents that investigate risks and complete tasks across enterprise systems.

Build agent harnesses for planning, tool use, memory, context compaction, and recovery during long-running work.
Integrate OpenAI and Anthropic model APIs while managing quality, latency, and cost.
Evaluate existing harnesses and build necessary components connected to AWS workflow execution.
Ensure authorization and sensitive writes are protected by application policy checks.
Build evaluation datasets and replay tests for access decisions, app setup, and AI agent onboarding.
Measure metrics including false positives, missed risks, unsafe actions, and completion rates.
Turn production failures into regression tests.
Test for prompt injection, stale evidence, and unsafe tool use to protect tenant boundaries.
Improve prompts, retrieval, tools, and model routing.
Evaluate fine-tuning or post-training methods when results justify them.

Strong Python engineering skills.
Experience shipping an LLM application that uses tools.
Hands-on experience building agent workflows or evaluation systems for tool-using LLM applications.
Experience integrating model APIs, structured outputs, and asynchronous services.
Depth in agent execution or evaluation systems with demonstrable failure analysis experience.
Ability to distinguish plausible model responses from supported findings or verified actions.