Staff AI Security Engineer

Okta is seeking a Staff AI Security Engineer to shape the security vision and hands-on controls for AI models, agentic workflows, and autonomous systems. This senior, individual-contributor role is based in Chicago with hybrid work options, offering a compensation range of USD 180,000 to 247,500 per year as part of a mission to enable secure AI at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy enterprise AI guardrails, gateways, and other controls to protect agentic workflows from emerging threats.
• Develop security architectures for both local and hosted agents to mitigate tool calling, prompt injection, goal misalignment, and data exfiltration risks.
• Create secure design patterns and developer tools that help engineering teams build and deploy AI features safely and quickly.
• Lead threat modeling and security reviews for agentic AI systems, enterprise deployments, and agent ecosystems.
• Build systems to discover, inventory, and assess AI usage and data flows across the enterprise.
• Design and operate internal AI security platforms and develop integrated AI capabilities that automate complex security operations.
• Drive technical alignment across product, security, and infrastructure teams and mentor engineers and security practitioners.

Requirements

• AI security expertise with deep knowledge of the AI threat landscape, including OWASP, MITRE ATLAS, and NIST AI RMF, with hands-on experience addressing prompt injection, excessive agency, and related threats.
• 8+ years in security engineering or backend software development, with strong coding skills in Python or Go and practical cloud experience.
• Experience securing or auditing agentic frameworks (such as LangChain, Strands, Claude Agent SDK, or similar tool-calling agents) operating in sandboxed environments.
• Proven ability to design scalable cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), API gateways, proxy architectures, and enterprise access controls.
• Track record of building developer-first security tools and platform controls that preserve engineering velocity.
• Strong technical leadership and communication skills, with a history of influencing engineering leaders and mentoring teams.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Security, or equivalent practical experience.

Technologies

• Python
• Go
• AWS
• GCP
• LangChain
• Strands
• Claude Agent SDK
• OWASP
• MITRE ATLAS
• NIST AI RMF

Benefits

• Support for your well-being
• Opportunities to contribute to social impact
• Talent development and community connection

The Okta Experience

• Support for your well-being
• Driving social impact
• Developing talent and fostering connection and community