Manager, Customer Identity, Security Engineering

Secure Every Identity, from AI to Human

Identity is the key to unlocking the potential of AI. Okta secures AI by building the trusted, neutral infrastructure that enables organizations to safely embrace this new era. This work requires a relentless drive to solve complex challenges with real-world stakes. We are looking for builders and owners who operate with speed and urgency and execute with excellence.

This is an opportunity to do career-defining work. We're all in on this mission. If you are too, let's talk.

Manager, Customer Identity, Security Engineering

Get to know Okta

Okta is The World’s Identity Company. We free everyone to safely use any technology—anywhere, on any device or app. Our Workforce and Customer Identity Clouds enable secure yet flexible access, authentication, and automation that transforms how people move through the digital world, putting Identity at the heart of business security and growth.

At Okta, we celebrate a variety of perspectives and experiences. We are not looking for someone who checks every single box - we’re looking for lifelong learners and people who can make us better with their unique experiences.

Join our team! We’re building a world where Identity belongs to you.

The Role

We seek a technical, hands-on Security Engineering Manager to build and lead a security engineering team within Auth0 Customer Identity that secures how we build and use AI. The team's work spans two areas. The first is building security tooling and controls for AI, including gateways and guardrails that secure the use of MCP servers, LLMs, agents, and the systems around them. The second is architecting and reviewing the security of our AI products, working shift-left with engineering and product teams so that security is built in from the start of design instead of added afterward.

This role leads a single team embedded within the Customer Identity product unit and works across Product, Engineering, and the broader Okta Security organization to turn AI security guidance into shipped controls, supporting the growth of our global Customer Identity business.

We are an engineering-focused organization that seeks to stay on the cutting edge of security technology and the AI threat landscape. In this role you will set direction for a team that doesn't just advise on AI risk — it builds the gateway, guardrails, and tooling that enforce secure AI usage, and reviews AI systems early enough to shape their design.

You will lead a globally distributed group of talented engineers who share a passion for security and enjoy solving complex problems at scale. This role works closely with and alongside the broader Okta Security team in support of Okta's company-wide security strategy and Okta’s Secure Identity Commitment .

This is a player-coach role. You will stay hands-on: designing and prototyping, writing and reviewing code, challenging architectures, and earning the respect of strong engineers, while also hiring, growing, and retaining your team and shaping its roadmap.

Responsibilities:

Hire, lead, coach, and develop a globally distributed team of security engineers (Senior through Staff), building a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and pragmatic security

Define and execute a multi-quarter roadmap for the team, aligned with Customer Identity business goals and Okta's company-wide security strategy, balancing gateway engineering with security review demand

Lead the design and delivery of an internal AI gateway that secures internal AI traffic — including agent, MCP, and LLM access — with authentication and authorization, policy enforcement, guardrails, auditing, and observability

Be hands-on in the team's technical work: contribute to architecture, prototypes, and code, and set the engineering bar for the team

Run an AI security review practice, similar to product security, that assesses AI-enabled features, services, models, and agent/MCP integrations through intake, threat modeling, design review, and actionable remediation guidance

Review and build security controls for AI systems, addressing risks such as prompt injection, insecure tool and agent permissions, data leakage, excessive agency, model and supply-chain risk, and abuse of agentic protocols (MCP, A2A)

Turn recurring review findings into reusable, secure-by-default controls, libraries, and patterns that engineering teams can adopt without a security engineer in the loop

Manage the intake and prioritization of AI security review requests, and decide what the team takes on, defers, or declines in line with capacity

Partner across Product, Engineering, and Identity Security leadership to embed AI security into the development lifecycle

Own and influence high-impact AI security architecture decisions across Auth0 and Okta Customer Identity infrastructure

Communicate risk, progress, and trade-offs clearly to senior leadership, and turn technical findings into clear guidance for engineering and product teams

Manage team health, prioritization, and delivery across remote, distributed time zones

What this position is not:

A purely people-management role without technical depth

Compliance-focused or policy-only AI governance leadership

Owning reactive patch and vulnerability management as a primary function

Requirements:

You have 3+ years of experience managing security or software engineering teams, with a track record of hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers

You have 8+ years of experience in security engineering, with a strong foundation in cloud infrastructure and/or product security

You have a hands-on development background in Golang and Node.js, and you remain hands-on, sufficient to design and build micro-services, evaluate prototypes, and contribute code to security tooling and the AI gateway

You have hands-on experience with AI/ML security — attacking, defending, or both (e.g., LLM/prompt-injection attacks, agentic-system or model abuse, adversarial ML) — and an interest in building controls, not just assessing risk

You have experience performing product security or application security reviews, including threat modeling and architecture/design review, ideally applied to AI/LLM-based systems

You have working knowledge of the AI agent / MCP ecosystem and its security implications, and of building secure API or gateway/proxy infrastructure (authentication, authorization, policy enforcement, rate limiting, auditing)

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 security standards and frameworks (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 a proven record of setting technical vision, defining multi-quarter strategy, driving architectural consensus, and influencing cross-organizational security initiatives

You have strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to turn technical findings into clear guidance for engineering, product, and executive audiences

You have experience leading a globally distributed and remote team across multiple time zones

Bonus points if:

You have built or led teams building an AI/LLM gateway, proxy, or guardrail platform in a production environment

You have built or led teams building AI/ML-powered security tooling or defensive automation in a production environment

You have published security research, CVEs, or conference talks in AI/ML security or identity security

You have working knowledge and experience with one or more of the following:

Adversarial ML, model red-teaming, or AI safety research

Identity and access management, including workload and agent identity

Full-stack engineering

Site reliability engineering

Governance, risk and compliance

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