Manager, Customer Identity, Security Engineering

The posting

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.

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, research-minded Security Engineering Manager to lead security engineering teams within Auth0 Customer Identity. Your teams' work spans two areas. The first is threat protection: providing general and AI-driven threat intelligence in partnership with Identity Security, and researching how attackers leverage AI, how we build AI-assisted defenses, and how we protect AI workloads across our products, infrastructure, and customer tenants. The second is software development for security: building micro-services and tooling that secure Customer Identity products and infrastructure, including how secrets are generated, stored, distributed, rotated, and retired.

This role leads teams embedded within the Customer Identity product unit and works across multiple functions to deliver proactive threat intelligence, get ahead of emerging attack vectors, and build the security software that protects our platform, 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 threat landscape. In this role you will set direction for teams that don't just assess our current security posture — they research what we should be protecting customers from one to two years ahead, build the software that delivers those protections, and help put AI-assisted defenses and secure-by-default secrets handling into the hands of the teams and customers who protect their tenants.

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.

You will stay technical enough to challenge designs, evaluate research, review software architecture, and earn the respect of strong engineers, while spending most of your time on leadership: hiring, growing, and retaining your teams and shaping their roadmaps.

Responsibilities:

• Hire, lead, coach, and develop globally distributed teams of security engineers (Senior through Staff), building a culture of research discipline, technical excellence, and ownership
• Define and execute a multi-quarter roadmap for your teams, aligned with Customer Identity business goals and Okta's company-wide security strategy, and balance investment and prioritization across them
• Lead the delivery of scalable, reliable micro-services and automation that secure Customer Identity products and infrastructure, including secrets storage, rotation, access control, auditing, and workload identity
• Drive adoption of secure-by-default secrets handling across Auth0 engineering teams, and reduce the risk from hard-coded, long-lived, or over-privileged credentials
• Research the emerging AI threat landscape and translate it into a forward-looking (12–24 month) view of what we need to protect ourselves and our customers from, then prioritize investments in detection, tooling, and protections to get there
• Direct research and protections against emerging general and AI-driven security threats targeting Auth0 and Auth0's customers — including traditional identity attacks as well as adversarial ML, prompt injection, abuse of agentic protocols (MCP, A2A, UCP), and data poisoning — as they apply to identity systems and customer tenants
• Guide the review and hardening of Auth0's AI security offering, using analysis of past incidents to drive improvements such as new detection signals, heuristic updates, and data labeling enhancements, while identifying gaps and recommending mitigations before they're exploited
• Partner with the identity security teams to help customers strengthen their own tenant security posture through comprehensive defenses and security countermeasures
• Partner across Product, Engineering, and Identity Security leadership to turn research into shipped protections for customer tenants, both proactively (hardening posture before an attack) and during active incidents (accelerating detection, triage, and response)
• Drive adoption of scalable security solutions and automation that operationalize threat defenses and secrets protections at scale
• Own and influence high-impact security architecture decisions across Auth0 and Okta Customer Identity infrastructure to support long-term threat resilience
• Collaborate with the Okta Security team on security operations and, where relevant, support investigations, root cause analysis, and remediation
• Advise stakeholders on mitigation strategies for security risks, including end-of-life software and vulnerabilities, in support of the teams that own patching
• Communicate risk, progress, and trade-offs clearly to senior leadership, and turn research into clear guidance for engineering and product teams
• Manage team health, prioritization, and delivery across time zones, including India

What this position is not:

• Dedicated application security, line-by-line code review, or compliance-focused leadership
• Owning reactive patch and vulnerability management as a primary function — this role is about getting ahead of threats, not chasing them
• A purely people-management role without technical depth

Requirements:

• You have 8+ years of experience in security engineering, with a strong foundation in cloud infrastructure and/or product security
• 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 a hands-on development background — Go / Node preferred — sufficient to guide the design and review of micro-services, evaluate prototypes, and steer the building of security tooling and AI-powered defenses
• You have hands-on experience with AI/ML security — attacking, defending, or both (e.g., adversarial ML, LLM/prompt-injection attacks, agentic-system or model abuse), and an interest in using AI to build defenses, not just to study attacks
• You have working knowledge of secrets management and cryptographic key handling (e.g., vaulting, rotation, short-lived credentials, workload identity)
• 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 research into clear guidance for engineering, product, and executive audiences
• You have experience leading a globally distributed and remote team, ideally across multiple time zones including India

Bonus points if:

• You have published threat research, CVEs, or conference talks in AI/ML security or identity security
• You have built or led teams building AI/ML-powered security tooling or defensive automation in a production environment
• You have experience building or operating secrets management platforms (e.g., HashiCorp Vault, cloud KMS and secret managers) at scale
• You have working knowledge and experience with one or more of the following:
• Adversarial ML, model red-teaming, or AI safety research
• The AI agent / MCP ecosystem and its security implications
• Identity and access management
• Full-stack engineering
• Site reliability engineering
• Vulnerability and threat management
• Governance, risk and compliance

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The Okta Experience

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Okta is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, marital status, age, physical or mental disability, or status as a protected veteran. We also consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and convictions records, consistent with applicable laws.

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