Principal Forward Deployed Engineer - Okta for AI Agents

Okta Okta · Enterprise · United States · Okta for AI Agents-764

Okta is seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer to be the senior technical authority for agent identity within their AI Agents offering. This role involves defining reference architectures, leading strategic deployments, mentoring other engineers, and influencing product roadmaps to ensure secure and trusted AI agent integration for enterprises. The position requires deep expertise in distributed systems, identity protocols, agent security, and fine-grained authorization, with hands-on experience in AI-native development.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the reference architecture. Define the canonical agent identity, delegation, audit, and kill-switch patterns that Senior FDEs deploy across the portfolio, and keep them current as the standards and the product move.
  2. Lead the hardest accounts. Personally own the most strategic, regulated, or technically novel deployments, the ones where there is no playbook yet.
  3. Raise the technical bar. Review other FDEs’ architectures, coach senior customer engineers and your own team, and set the standard for what good looks like in the field.
  4. Shape the roadmap. Synthesize patterns across every account into a clear point of view, and work directly with product and engineering leadership to prioritize what ships next.
  5. Represent Okta as a technical authority. Brief CISO, CIO, and Chief AI Officer audiences, contribute to the standards and frameworks shaping agent identity, and carry the external technical voice.

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years shipping production software
  • deep distributed systems and identity experience
  • track record of staying hands-on while setting direction
  • OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, RFC 8693 token exchange, act claims, CIMD and DCR, DPoP
  • OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications, NIST AI RMF, MITRE ATLAS, MCP, A2A, ISO/IEC 42001, and the EU AI Act
  • HIPAA, FedRAMP, and SOC 2 environments
  • ReBAC and ABAC with policy engines (OPA, Cedar, OpenFGA, or equivalent)
  • Production integrations across the major agent platforms and MCP
  • daily AI-native development
  • setting technical direction across multiple teams or accounts
  • mentoring senior engineers
  • Credible from the IDE to the boardroom
  • steady when account politics get sharp
  • High agency, founder’s mindset

Nice to have

  • Contribution to standards or open source

What the JD emphasized

  • deep distributed systems and identity experience
  • Authority-level identity protocols
  • Deep agent security fluency
  • Expert fine-grained authorization
  • Proven AI hands-on
  • Production integrations across the major agent platforms
  • daily AI-native development
  • regulated
  • HIPAA, FedRAMP, and SOC 2 environments

Other signals

  • AI agents require identity, scope, audit trails, and shutdown mechanisms.
  • Building the infrastructure for secure AI agent deployment.
  • Defining patterns for agent identity, delegation, audit, and kill-switches.