Staff Machine Learning Engineer, SecureAI

We are seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join the Okta Secures AI Team, specifically the Agent Access Policies sub-team. The successful candidate will help advance Okta's authorization capabilities by replacing static, rule-based systems with dynamic AI security mechanisms.

Responsibilities:

• Implement intent-based enforcement to verify agent runtime requests match their intended purpose
• Apply LLM reasoning and prompt parsing to interpret prompts, tool payloads, and intent in real time
• Integrate low-latency inference or semantic evaluation engines directly into the API gateway request path
• Use embeddings, vector search, or zero-shot classification to score alignment between agent intent and executed actions
• Design confidence-scored decision engines that feed semantic verification results into policy frameworks
• Establish evaluation benchmarks, prompt injection defenses, and guardrails to prevent bypasses or false positives
• Architect scalable ML and Generative AI systems integrating retrieval, inference, and evaluation pipelines
• Optimize prompting, context retrieval, and RAG workflows for accuracy, safety, and efficiency in Claude-based systems
• Build automated evaluation pipelines to measure model quality, correctness, groundedness, and safety in production
• Implement schema validation, structured output enforcement, and guardrails to ensure reliable, compliant AI outputs

Requirements:

• 8+ years of software development experience, with strong programming expertise in Python
• Hands-on experience with applied machine learning, from feature engineering to training and fine-tuning models
• Hands-on experience with modern Generative AI platforms
• Deep understanding of retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, and knowledge-base workflows
• Hands-on experience with LiteLLM, LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, MCP, or other related AI agent frameworks
• Familiarity with ML frameworks and workflow orchestration tools
• Experience defining evaluation metrics, pipelines, and feedback loops for ML/GenAI systems
• Proven ability to collaborate with product and engineering teams to drive greenfield initiatives forward
• Experience building tools or infrastructure for AI/ML applications, with a deep understanding of the developer lifecycle in an AI-native world

Nice to Have:

• Experience integrating AI-driven systems with identity, authentication, or security products
• Exposure to ethical AI, model risk, or compliance frameworks
• Familiarity with evaluation datasets, synthetic data generation, or LLM-as-a-judge methods

The annual base salary range for this position for candidates located in Canada is between $168,000-$231,000 CAD. Okta offers equity, bonus, and benefits, including health, dental, and vision insurance, RRSP with a match, healthcare spending, telemedicine, and paid leave.