Staff Software Engineer - Advanced Threat Protection
Okta · Posted Oct 7
Cloud-based identity and access management solutions for workforce and customer security
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About the role
Okta is The World's Identity Company, providing Workforce and Customer Identity Clouds that enable secure access, authentication, and automation. The Advanced Threat Protection team within Auth0 Customer Identity is an engineering-focused security team that researches emerging AI threats to identity systems and builds AI-assisted defenses for Okta's products, infrastructure, and customer tenants. This role researches how attackers will use AI against identity systems and how AI can be used defensively, working across engineering, product, and enterprise security to ship protections for customer tenants.
What you will do
- Research and lead how we can use AI to protect customer tenants — both proactively (hardening posture before an attack) and during active incidents (accelerating detection, triage, and response)
- Research and build protections against novel AI attacks that Auth0 and Auth0's customers can be subjected to — adversarial ML, prompt injection, abuse of agentic protocols (MCP, A2A, UCP, and emerging equivalents), model and data poisoning — as they apply to identity systems and customer tenants
- Partner with the identity security teams to help customers strengthen their own tenant security posture through AI-assisted defenses
- Research the emerging AI threat landscape and translate it into a forward-looking (12–24 month) view of what we need to protect ourselves and our customers from — then architect, recommend, and build the tooling to get there
- Review and harden Auth0's AI security offering, identifying gaps and recommending mitigations before they're exploited
- Partner across a globally distributed product-aligned team of security engineers to turn research into shipped protections for customer tenants
- Establish and execute a long-term engineering and threat research roadmap for Advanced Threat Protection aligned with company-wide business and security goals.
- Own high-impact security architecture designs and decisions across Auth0 and Okta Customer Identity infrastructure to support long-term threat resilience.
- Drive cross-functional security strategies and partner across engineering, product, and enterprise security leadership across Okta to influence platform-wide standards and policies.
- Actively coach, mentor, and level up Senior (P3) engineers and team members, fostering technical excellence, research discipline, and leadership growth.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- You have hands-on experience with AI/ML security — attacking, defending, or both (e.g., adversarial ML, LLM/prompt-injection attacks, agentic-system or model abuse), and an interest in using AI to build defenses, not just to study attacks
- 8+ years of experience in security engineering, with a proven track record of setting technical vision, driving cross-organizational initiatives, and leading architectural choices in cloud/product security.
- Demonstrated experience mentoring senior-level engineers, defining multi-quarter technical strategy, driving architectural consensus, and influencing cross-organizational security initiatives.
- You have hands-on development experience — Go preferred — sufficient to prototype tooling, build AI-powered defenses, and operationalize your research
- You have working knowledge and hands-on experience with one or more of the following:
- AWS and/or Azure security
- Kubernetes
- You have strong knowledge of OWASP (including the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications) and secure coding best practices
- You have a strong foundation in secure software development lifecycle best practices
- You have strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to turn research into clear guidance for engineering and product teams
- You have experience working with a globally distributed and remote team
Preferred qualifications
- You have published threat research, CVEs, or conference talks in AI/ML security or identity security
- You have built AI/ML-powered security tooling or defensive automation in a production environment
- You have working knowledge and experience with one or more of the following:
- Adversarial ML, model red-teaming, or AI safety research
- The AI agent / MCP ecosystem and its security implications
- Identity and access management
- Full-stack engineering
- Site reliability engineering
- Vulnerability and threat management
- Governance, risk and compliance
Benefits and support
- Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting
About Okta
Okta is a leading independent provider of cloud-based identity and access management solutions that securely connect people and technologies to the right applications. The company powers both Workforce Identity and Customer Identity platforms, allowing organizations to securely manage user access and navigate modern challenges like agentic AI security.
- Industry
- Enterprise Software
- Company size
- 7500+ employees
- Founded
- 2009
- Location
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Funding
Public Company · $228M raised
- 2010-02-01Series A$10M
- 2011-08-01Series B$16.5M
- 2012-12-01Series C$25M
- 2013-09-01Series D$27M
- 2014-06-01Series E$75M
- 2015-09-01Series F$75M
- 2018-02-21Post IPO Debt$300M
Leadership
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Co-Founder and Executive Vice Chairman
Chief Marketing Officer
Chief Legal Officer
Recent coverage
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