About the Role
At Okta, we’re building the future of secure, enterprise-grade AI Agents. We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to join our global AI Engineering team. In this role, you will be instrumental in designing and building the intelligent, user-facing experiences and the end-to-end AI solutions that power them.
This is a senior individual contributor role for a hands-on engineer who can set technical direction, mentor others, and partner closely with our cross-geo counterparts as part of one global team.
What you'll do:
- Drive the architecture and design of AI solutions, leading cross-functional initiatives across Product, Design, and Data Science.
- Design, build, and refine the core backend services that power our AI solutions, including LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, and generative AI features.
- Build high-performance Agentic Experiences (AX) for web and mobile, engineered for streaming responses and low latency.
- Champion observability and operational excellence to ensure our AI services meet enterprise-grade standards for reliability and performance.
- Develop robust backend services to power our AI solutions, including LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, and generative AI features.
- Enable the successful delivery of key AI projects through technical leadership and hands-on execution.
- Mentor engineers, raising the bar on technical craftsmanship and solution quality across the full stack.
- Collaborate with cross-geo peers to ensure globally aligned designs, shared roadmaps, and scalable architectures.
- Partner with Security, Data, and Infrastructure teams to ensure AI adoption is secure, reliable, and enterprise-ready.
What we are looking for:
- 12+ years in software engineering, with a strong emphasis on backend systems design and development (8+ years in Python preferred).
- 6+ years with modern front-end frameworks (e.g., React, Next.js, TypeScript), principles of accessibility (a11y), and an ability to collaborate effectively with Product & Design.
- Proven experience building and deploying production-grade AI applications and services.
- Experience with agentic frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, and LangSmith is a strong plus.
- Strong background in building distributed systems, microservices, and resilient APIs (REST/GraphQL) on cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure).
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy and lead architecture decisions across global teams.
- Excellent communication skills with experience working effectively across time zones and cultures.