Okta is hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in Toronto!
Okta is hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer for its Generative AI team in Toronto, working in a hybrid arrangement. The group builds AI-powered security services, generative chat support experiences, and authentication tooling for generative AI and AI agents, partnering closely with the broader machine learning organization and product teams. This is a senior individual-contributor role centered on architecting and shipping production-grade ML and GenAI systems at scale — spanning model development, LLMOps pipelines, retrieval and inference infrastructure, and reusable platform components other Okta teams can build on. The position also carries mentoring duties and a strong emphasis on reliability, safety, auditability, and enterprise compliance for AI outputs. The posting notes that candidates need not meet every listed criterion and encourages applicants from a range of backgrounds.
Key responsibilities
- Design and deploy ML and generative AI systems that integrate cleanly with platform services and support scalable LLMOps pipelines in production
- Balance simplicity, flexibility, reliability, and performance when making technical decisions
- Tune, optimize, and deploy agentic applications with attention to performance, reliability, and security
- Build observable systems that connect retrieval, inference, and evaluation stages
- Develop and iterate on structured prompting, context retrieval, and RAG workflows to improve accuracy, safety, and cost efficiency
- Create automated evaluation pipelines measuring model quality, correctness, groundedness, and safety
- Implement schema validation, structured output enforcement, and other guardrails for reliable, auditable, compliant outputs
- Partner with product, security, and platform engineering teams on trustworthy AI-powered experiences
- Mentor and coach engineers, supporting team and broader engineering community growth
Key requirements
- 7+ years of software development experience with strong Python skills; Go or TypeScript a plus
- Hands-on applied machine learning experience, from feature engineering through training and fine-tuning
- Experience with modern generative AI platforms such as AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, or Anthropic
- Deep understanding of retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, and knowledge-base workflows
- Hands-on use of agent frameworks such as LiteLLM, LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or MCP
- Familiarity with ML frameworks (FastAPI, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Spark ML) and orchestration tools like Airflow
- Experience defining evaluation metrics, pipelines, and feedback loops for ML or GenAI systems
- Proven collaboration on greenfield initiatives, navigating ambiguity and iterating quickly
- Nice to have: identity, authentication, or security product integration; ethical AI, model risk, or compliance exposure; synthetic data generation or LLM-as-a-judge methods
- Seniority: Staff
- Work mode: Hybrid
- Salary: $168,000 - $231,000 CAD
- Key skills: Python, Go, TypeScript, Machine Learning, Generative AI, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, RAG, Embeddings, LiteLLM, LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, MCP
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