Interested in this AI Agent Developer role at Okta?
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Secure Every Identity, from AI to Human
Identity is the key to unlocking the potential of AI. Okta secures AI by building the trusted, neutral infrastructure that enables organizations to safely embrace this new era. This work requires a relentless drive to solve complex challenges with real\-world stakes. We are looking for builders and owners who operate with speed and urgency and execute with excellence.
This is an opportunity to do career\-defining work. We're all in on this mission. If you are too, let's talk.
About Okta for AI Agents
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Okta secures access for 20,000 organizations and billions of users. Okta for AI Agents extends that work to the agentic shift. Deploying an AI agent is not like deploying traditional software. You are putting professional work output into production, and it needs deep integration, continuous tuning, and change management. Every agent needs an identity, a scope, an audit trail, and a way to be shut down when it goes wrong. Most enterprises have not built this yet. We are.
We hire builders who see the cracks in enterprise agent identity that everyone else has learned to live with, and we hire leaders who can turn a handful of those builders into a function.
The Role
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You build and lead the Forward Deployed Engineering team for Okta for AI Agents. Your engineers embed inside Okta's most strategic enterprise customers and own the technical outcome for agent identity from prototype to production. You own the team that makes those deployments succeed, the engagement model behind them, and the loop that turns what the field learns into Okta's product.
You are a player\-coach in the truest sense. You lead a team of five Senior and Principal Forward Deployed Engineers, and you carry your own delivery alongside them: you personally own the agent identity outcome in one of our most strategic accounts, hands\-on in the IDE and in the architecture room. You are the role model for the role, the bar your engineers measure themselves against in technical craft and in how they show up with customers, and you are judged both by what you ship yourself and by how far your team goes.
Responsibilities
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- Build and lead the team. Hire, onboard, and develop a team of five Senior and Principal Forward Deployed Engineers. Set the bar for the role, protect it, and build the career paths that keep elite engineers in the field.
- Deliver hands\-on yourself. Personally own agent identity delivery in one strategic account: write production code, own the architecture and the kill\-switch design, and pass the security review. You lead from inside the work, not above it.
- Be the role model. Set the standard the team builds to, in engineering craft, in customer trust, and in how the hardest accounts get handled. Your engineers learn the role by watching how you do it.
- Own the engagement model. Define how FDEs embed in strategic accounts, how engagements are scoped, and how agents move from prototype to production with full identity coverage and a clean security review.
- Be accountable for field outcomes. Across the team's portfolio of strategic accounts: agents in production, security reviews passed, AI governance requirements met, and posture and inventory visibility online.
- Run the field\-to\-product loop. Aggregate the recurring agent identity gaps the team finds in the field and turn them into prioritized, well\-formed input to the O4AA roadmap with product and engineering leadership.
- Coach on the hard accounts. Step into the toughest technical and political situations alongside your engineers, and help them navigate architecture review boards, security councils, and CISO conversations.
- Partner across go\-to\-market. Work with sales, solutions engineering, customer success, and professional services so FDE engagements land cleanly and scale across the customer base.
- Represent the function to senior leadership. Brief CISO, CIO, and Chief AI Officer audiences on agent security posture, and translate agent risk into terms the business acts on.
- Operate the team. Plan capacity across accounts, manage travel and on\-call load so the team is not run into the ground, and track the metrics that show the function is working.
Requirements
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- Leadership track record. 3\+ years managing engineers or technical field teams (forward deployed, solutions engineering, professional services, or platform), with a record of hiring and growing senior technical talent.
- Ability to travel 35% (on occasion internationally)
- Still a builder. A background shipping production software and the current depth to deliver hands\-on yourself: review and write agent identity code, own an architecture, and earn a principal engineer's respect.
- Identity and agent security fluency. Working command of OAuth 2\.0, OIDC, RFC 8693 token exchange, and the agentic identity problem: delegation versus impersonation, MCP, and fine\-grained authorization.
- Field and customer experience. You have personally delivered or led complex technical engagements inside enterprise customers, and you are steady when account politics get sharp.
- Customer\-facing range. Comfortable in a customer standup and a CISO briefing on the same day, credible with both senior engineers and executives.
- Cross\-functional operator. You work well with sales, product, and engineering leadership, and you turn field signal into roadmap influence.
- High agency, builder's mindset. Comfortable standing up a new function in an ambiguous, fast\-moving space, and owning outcomes end to end.
\#LI\-Hybrid
(P25260\_3456774\)
The Okta Experience
- Supporting Your Well\-Being
- Driving Social Impact
- Developing Talent and Fostering Connection \+ Community
We are intentional about connection. Our global community, spanning over 20 offices worldwide, is united by a drive to innovate. Your journey begins with an immersive, in\-person onboarding experience designed to accelerate your impact and connect you to our mission and team from day one.
Okta is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, or status as a protected veteran. We also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and convictions records, consistent with applicable laws.
If reasonable accommodation is needed to complete any part of the job application, interview process, or onboarding please use this Form to request an accommodation.
Notice for New York City Applicants \& Employees: Okta may use Automated Employment Decision Tools (AEDT), as defined by New York City Local Law 144, that use artificial intelligence, machine learning, or other automated processes to assist in our recruitment and hiring process. In accordance with NYC Local Law 144, if you are an applicant or employee residing in New York City, please click here to view our full NYC AEDT Notice.
Okta is committed to complying with applicable data privacy and security laws and regulations. For more information, please see our Personnel and Job Candidate Privacy Notice at https://www.okta.com/legal/personnel\-policy/.
Salary Context
This $282K-$388K range is above the 75th percentile for AI Agent Developer roles in our dataset (median: $192K across 41 roles with salary data).
View full AI Agent Developer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI Agent Developers build autonomous systems that can reason, plan, and take actions. They design multi-step workflows, tool-use frameworks, and orchestration layers that let LLMs interact with external systems. This is the frontier of applied AI engineering.
Agent development is where the most interesting (and hardest) problems in applied AI live right now. Making an LLM answer a question is straightforward. Making it reliably execute a 15-step workflow that involves calling APIs, reading databases, making decisions, and recovering from errors is an unsolved problem. You're building systems that have to work despite the fact that the underlying model is non-deterministic.
Across the 3,823 AI roles we're tracking, AI Agent Developer positions make up 1% of the market. At Okta, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
AI Agent Developer is one of the newest and fastest-growing AI role categories. The market is early but accelerating as companies move beyond simple chatbots toward AI systems that can take real actions. Compensation is high because the skill set is rare and the business impact is potentially enormous.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week includes: designing the action space and tool definitions for a new agent use case, debugging why the agent chose the wrong action sequence on a specific input, building evaluation frameworks that test agent reliability across hundreds of scenarios, optimizing the prompt chain for cost and latency, and implementing safety guardrails to prevent the agent from taking destructive actions. The work is equal parts engineering and empirical science.
AI Agent Developer is one of the newest and fastest-growing AI role categories. The market is early but accelerating as companies move beyond simple chatbots toward AI systems that can take real actions. Compensation is high because the skill set is rare and the business impact is potentially enormous.
Skills in Demand for This Role
Deep experience with LLM APIs and agent frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen). Strong understanding of prompt engineering, function calling, and error handling for non-deterministic systems. Python is standard. Experience with orchestration patterns, state management, and workflow engines adds significant value.
The best agent developers think like systems engineers. They design for failure modes, build observability into every step, and understand that agent reliability is the product. Expertise in evaluation methodology for non-deterministic systems is the differentiator. Can you measure whether your agent works 'well enough'? Can you find the edge cases where it breaks?
Look for roles that describe specific agent use cases, mention evaluation methodology, and talk about production deployment. Early-stage companies exploring agents can be exciting, but be prepared for ambiguity. The most valuable roles are at companies that have already shipped a v1 and need to make it reliable.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI Agent Developer roles pay a median of $245,040 based on 106 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $227,400. This role's midpoint ($335K) sits 37% above the category median. Disclosed range: $282K to $388K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($275,000) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,880; Mid: $165,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $247,800; VP: $250,000.
Okta AI Hiring
Okta has 6 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI Agent Developer, AI Product Manager. Positions span Bellevue, WA, US, San Francisco, CA, US, San Mateo, CA, US. Compensation range: $219K - $388K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 15% (590 positions) offer remote work, while 3,217 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,643 roles, $211,000 median); San Francisco (2,168 roles, $253,000 median); Los Angeles (1,792 roles, $191,580 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI Agent Developer roles include Software Engineer, LLM Engineer, Prompt Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward AI Architect, Principal Engineer, Head of AI Engineering.
Build agents. That's the portfolio. Take an open-source agent framework, build something that completes a non-trivial multi-step task, evaluate it rigorously, and document what you learned about reliability, cost, and failure modes. The field is new enough that practical experience counts for more than credentials.
What to Expect in Interviews
Interviews focus on systems thinking and reliability engineering. Expect questions about agent architecture: how you'd design a multi-step workflow with error recovery, how you'd evaluate agent performance, and how you'd prevent agents from taking destructive actions. Coding exercises often involve building a simple agent with tool use and evaluating its behavior across different scenarios. Discussion of safety and guardrails is increasingly common.
When evaluating opportunities: Look for roles that describe specific agent use cases, mention evaluation methodology, and talk about production deployment. Early-stage companies exploring agents can be exciting, but be prepared for ambiguity. The most valuable roles are at companies that have already shipped a v1 and need to make it reliable.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 3,823 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 112 entry-level, 1,798 mid-level, 1,516 senior, and 397 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (590 positions). The remaining 3,217 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($275,000 median, 41 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 55 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 434 roles).
AI Agent Developer is one of the newest and fastest-growing AI role categories. The market is early but accelerating as companies move beyond simple chatbots toward AI systems that can take real actions. Compensation is high because the skill set is rare and the business impact is potentially enormous.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 3,823 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,629), Data Scientist (322), AI Software Engineer (279). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (112) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,798) and senior (1,516) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 397 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (590 positions), with 3,217 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $200,100. Top-quartile roles start at $253,500, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $275,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,979 postings), Aws (1,190 postings), Azure (899 postings), Rag (839 postings), Gcp (726 postings), Pytorch (595 postings), Prompt Engineering (595 postings), Claude (540 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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