Principal Software Engineer, Applied AI

Okta Inc

Confirmed live today High trust

Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
San Francisco, CA
Salary
$224,000–$308,000 / yr
Posted
12 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live today

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $223k
This role $266k
$123k $328k
below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays more than 84% of similar roles. Most pay $197,312–$248,125 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $266k versus about $223k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Okta Inc

Okta, Inc. is an American identity and access management company based in San Francisco. It provides cloud software that helps companies manage and secure user authentication into applications, and for developers to build identity controls into applications, websites, web services, and devices.[

Okta Inc currently has 103 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $174,000–$238,000 across 103 roles with salary data.

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View all roles at Okta Inc

At a glance

TL;DR · Principal Software Engineer, Applied AI

The Principal Software Engineer, Applied AI joins the team developing Digital Workers, a suite of autonomous agents for identity operations and security. In this role, you will build agent harnesses for planning, tool use, memory, and recovery while integrating OpenAI and Anthropic model APIs. You will be responsible for creating evaluation datasets, measuring false positives, and ensuring authorization remains behind application policy checks. The position requires strong Python engineering skills and experience with LLM applications using tools like LangChain, LangGraph, or the Claude Agent SDK. You will work with a stack including FastAPI, AWS Step Functions, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, PostgreSQL, and pgvector. The work focuses on solving complex identity and security problems by building reliable, production-grade autonomous agents that can investigate risks and complete enterprise tasks.

What does a Software Engineer earn in California?

Median $214500 from 1193 postings across 76 companies.

See salary data

What you'll do

  • Build agent harnesses for planning, tool use, memory, context compaction, and recovery during long-running tasks.
  • Integrate OpenAI and Anthropic model APIs while selecting models based on quality, latency, and cost.
  • Evaluate existing harnesses and build missing components connected to AWS workflow execution and approval states.
  • Enforce application policy checks for authorization and sensitive writes, requiring evidence of state before completion.
  • Build evaluation datasets and replay tests for valid findings, access decisions, and AI agent onboarding.
  • Measure production metrics like false positives and missed risks, converting failures into regression tests.
  • Test for prompt injection, stale evidence, conflicting instructions, and unsafe tool use to protect tenant boundaries.
  • Improve prompts, retrieval, and model routing while evaluating fine-tuning methods when results justify them.

What we're looking for

  • Strong Python engineering skills and experience shipping an LLM application that uses tools.
  • Hands-on experience building agent workflows or evaluation systems for tool-using LLM applications.
  • Experience integrating model APIs, structured outputs, and asynchronous services.
  • Experience with OpenAI or Anthropic is especially relevant.
  • Depth in agent execution or evaluation systems, with working code and failure analysis you can explain.
  • Ability to distinguish a plausible model response from a supported finding or verified action.
  • Open-source contributions, agent observability, security evaluations, or synthetic evaluation data (preferred).
  • Fine-tuning, preference data, post-training evaluation, or model distillation using approved datasets (preferred).

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