Okta is hiring a Staff ML Engineer SecureAI in Toronto!
Okta is hiring a Staff ML Engineer for its SecureAI / AI Agents group in Toronto, focused on the Agent Access Policies sub-team. The role centers on moving authorization beyond static rules toward AI-driven security that can inspect threats, evaluate agent intent, and analyze behavior in real time so autonomous agents stay within approved limits. You would help shape a unified control plane for agentic identity, connecting model-based reasoning with policy enforcement and production-grade safeguards. The position is hybrid and suits someone who can architect greenfield ML and generative AI systems while working closely with product and engineering partners in a fast-moving security domain.
Key responsibilities
- Build runtime enforcement that checks whether an agent's request matches its declared purpose.
- Use LLM reasoning and prompt parsing to interpret prompts, tool payloads, and intent during live requests.
- Embed low-latency inference or semantic scoring directly in the API gateway request path.
- Apply embeddings, vector search, or zero-shot classification to measure alignment between intent and action.
- Design confidence-scored decision services that pass semantic verification into policy engines such as Cedar.
- Create evaluation benchmarks, prompt-injection defenses, and guardrails that reduce bypasses and false positives.
- Architect scalable ML and generative AI systems spanning retrieval, inference, and evaluation pipelines.
- Improve prompting, context retrieval, and RAG workflows for accuracy, safety, and efficiency in Claude-based systems.
- Build automated evaluation pipelines for model quality, correctness, groundedness, and production safety.
- Add schema validation, structured output enforcement, and guardrails for reliable, compliant AI outputs.
Key requirements
- 8+ years of software development experience with strong Python skills; Go or TypeScript is a plus.
- Hands-on applied ML experience, including feature engineering, model training, and fine-tuning.
- Experience with generative AI platforms such as AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
- Deep knowledge of RAG, embeddings, and knowledge-base workflows.
- Hands-on work with agent frameworks such as LiteLLM, LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or MCP.
- Familiarity with ML frameworks and orchestration tools such as FastAPI, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Spark ML, and Airflow.
- Experience defining evaluation metrics, pipelines, and feedback loops for ML or generative AI systems.
- Ability to collaborate with product and engineering teams on greenfield initiatives and navigate ambiguity.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- Seniority: Staff
- Work mode: Hybrid
- Salary: $168,000 - $231,000 CAD
- Key skills: Python, Go, TypeScript, applied machine learning, generative AI, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, RAG, embeddings, vector search, zero-shot classification, LiteLLM, LangGraph, LangChain
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