Senior Manager of AI Forward Deployed Engineering, Okta
Okta for AI Agents
$252-388k
OTE
Salary applicable to California based applicants
More information about location
Management platform securing resources from cloud to ground
Posted today
Management platform securing resources from cloud to ground
1001+ employees
Posted today
$252-388k
OTE
Salary applicable to California based applicants
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To improve the connections between people and tools to make companies more productive and secure.
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
- 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
Our take
Okta started off as an identity company where organisations, large and small, could tap into the company to have a single sign-on interface to access all cloud applications now centralised. Okta has since expanded to provide identity management at the device as well as the server level.
The new approach towards network security is increasingly based on identification and authentication, and Okta is on track to become the go-to vendor in the space. It aims to do so by developing products that enable people to access applications and other tools more smoothly and securely than ever before.
Okta has taken strides towards expansion through significant employee growth and shuffling executive leadership. The company has also made lateral moves such as tackling governance concerns, opening up new paths for revenue.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
19% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Sep 2015
$75m
SERIES F
Jun 2014
$75m
SERIES E
Total funding: $229.3m
Company benefits
- Work from home opportunities
- Health + Wellness
- Financial Benefits
- Pay + Incentives
- Time Off
- Everyday Living
- Resources
Company HQ
The East Cut, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Todd McKinnon
(Co-Founder & CEO)VP of Development at Salesforce.com and has nearly a decade of experience in various engineering and leadership roles at PeopleSoft.
Frederic Kerrest
(Co-Founder & Vice Chairman)Worked in Sales and Business Development at Salesforce.com, and previously co-founded high-tech consulting firm Meridian Global Solutions.
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