Principal Forward Deployed EngineerActive

The opportunity

You are the most senior technical field authority for agent identity at Okta. Where a Senior FDE owns the outcome inside one account, you own the patterns that every account and every FDE inherits.

What you'll do

  • Own the reference architecture. Define the canonical agent identity,: delegation, audit, and kill-switch patterns that Senior FDEs deploy across the portfolio, and keep them current as the standards and the product move.

  • Lead the hardest accounts. Personally own the most strategic, regulated, or: technically novel deployments, the ones where there is no playbook yet.

  • Raise the technical bar. Review other FDEs’ architectures, coach senior: customer engineers and your own team, and set the standard for what good looks like in the field.

  • Shape the roadmap. Synthesize patterns across every account into a clear: point of view, and work directly with product and engineering leadership to prioritize what ships next.

  • Represent Okta as a technical authority. Brief CISO, CIO, and Chief AI: Officer audiences, contribute to the standards and frameworks shaping agent identity, and carry the external technical voice.

  • Resolve what others cannot. Step into the hardest technical and political: situations across accounts and find the path forward.

What they're looking for

  • Engineering depth. 10+ years shipping production software, with deep: distributed systems and identity experience and a track record of staying hands-on while setting direction.
  • Authority-level identity protocols. OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, RFC 8693: token exchange, act claims, CIMD and DCR, DPoP. Contribution to standards or open source is a plus.
  • Deep agent security fluency. OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications, NIST AI: RMF, MITRE ATLAS, plus MCP, A2A, ISO/IEC 42001, and the EU AI Act, with the judgment to apply them in HIPAA, FedRAMP, and SOC 2 environments.
  • Expert fine-grained authorization. ReBAC and ABAC with policy engines (OPA,: Cedar, OpenFGA, or equivalent), and command of the design tradeoffs at scale.
  • Proven AI hands-on. Production integrations across the major agent platforms: and MCP, and daily AI-native development.
  • Force multiplier. A record of setting technical direction across multiple: teams or accounts, and of mentoring senior engineers.
  • Customer-facing authority. Credible from the IDE to the boardroom, trusted by: CISOs and principal engineers alike, and steady when account politics get sharp.
  • High agency, founder’s mindset. Applied to building a function, not just an account.