About the Role
You build and lead the Forward Deployed Engineering team for Okta for AI Agents. Your engineers embed inside Okta’s most strategic enterprise customers and own the technical outcome for agent identity from prototype to production. You own the team that makes those deployments succeed, the engagement model behind them, and the loop that turns what the field learns into Okta’s product.
You are a player-coach in the truest sense. You lead a team of five Senior and Principal Forward Deployed Engineers, and you carry your own delivery alongside them: you personally own the agent identity outcome in one of our most strategic accounts, hands-on in the IDE and in the architecture room. You are the role model for the role, the bar your engineers measure themselves against in technical craft and in how they show up with customers, and you are judged both by what you ship yourself and by how far your team goes.
Responsibilities
- Build and lead the team. Hire, onboard, and develop a team of five Senior and Principal Forward Deployed Engineers. Set the bar for the role, protect it, and build the career paths that keep elite engineers in the field.
- Deliver hands-on yourself. Personally own agent identity delivery in one strategic account: write production code, own the architecture and the kill-switch design, and pass the security review. You lead from inside the work, not above it.
- Be the role model. Set the standard the team builds to, in engineering craft, in customer trust, and in how the hardest accounts get handled. Your engineers learn the role by watching how you do it.
- Own the engagement model. Define how FDEs embed in strategic accounts, how engagements are scoped, and how agents move from prototype to production with full identity coverage and a clean security review.
- Be accountable for field outcomes. Across the team’s portfolio of strategic accounts: agents in production, security reviews passed, AI governance requirements met, and posture and inventory visibility online.
- Run the field-to-product loop. Aggregate the recurring agent identity gaps the team finds in the field and turn them into prioritized, well-formed input to the O4AA roadmap with product and engineering leadership.
- Coach on the hard accounts. Step into the toughest technical and political situations alongside your engineers, and help them navigate architecture review boards, security councils, and CISO conversations.
- Partner across go-to-market. Work with sales, solutions engineering, customer success, and professional services so FDE engagements land cleanly and scale across the customer base.
- Represent the function to senior leadership. Brief CISO, CIO, and Chief AI Officer audiences on agent security posture, and translate agent risk into terms the business acts on.
- Operate the team. Plan capacity across accounts, manage travel and on-call load so the team is not run into the ground, and track the metrics that show the function is working.
Requirements
- Leadership track record. 3+ years managing engineers or technical field teams (forward deployed, solutions engineering, professional services, or platform), with a record of hiring and growing senior technical talent.
- Ability to travel 35% (on occasion internationally)
- Still a builder. A background shipping production software and the current depth to deliver hands-on yourself: review and write agent identity code, own an architecture, and earn a principal engineer’s respect.
- Identity and agent security fluency. Working command of OAuth 2.0, OIDC, RFC 8693 token exchange, and the agentic identity problem: delegation versus impersonation, MCP, and fine-grained authorization.
- Field and customer experience. You have personally delivered or led complex technical engagements inside enterprise customers, and you are steady when account politics get sharp.
- Customer-facing range. Comfortable in a customer standup and a CISO briefing on the same day, credible with both senior engineers and executives.
- Cross-functional operator. You work well with sales, product, and engineering leadership, and you turn field signal into roadmap influence.
- High agency, builder’s mindset. Comfortable standing up a new function in an ambiguous, fast-moving space, and owning outcomes end to end.