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 flexible and neutral products, Okta Platform and Auth0 Platform, provide secure access, authentication, and automation, placing identity at the core 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.
About the Role:
We’re looking for an experienced AI User Research Scientist to help shape the future of AI-driven security products at Auth0. This is not a traditional usability-focused role. You will be responsible for deeply understanding user needs, validating assumptions behind AI-powered solutions, and determining whether what we're building will be trusted, adopted, and ultimately deliver product-market fit.
In this highly strategic and cross-functional position, you'll work closely with engineers, AI researchers, product managers, and designers to ensure our LLM-based and agentic systems are grounded in human needs, secure by design, and aligned with business viability. This role requires a unique blend of user research expertise, market understanding, strategic foresight, and technical fluency in the AI product development process, which differs significantly from traditional software product development.
Key Responsibilities:
- Strategic Product-Market Fit and Assumption Validation
- Lead research to test key assumptions around user behavior, trust, mental models, and willingness to adopt AI-powered security tools.
- Explore early-stage product concepts to assess user needs, barriers to adoption, and potential monetization strategies.
- Provide insights that shape long-term product direction and investment in AI capabilities.
- Human-AI Interaction Research
- Design and execute studies that explore how users perceive, trust, and interact with LLMs, agents, and autonomous systems.
- Investigate failure modes, expectations, and control preferences in high-risk domains such as identity and security.
Help product and engineering teams balance automation with human agency.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration with AI & Engineering
- Partner with AI engineers, product managers, and designers to understand technical foundations (e.g., prompting strategies, model capabilities, hallucination risks).
- Translate user insights into meaningful guidance for cross-functional teams.
- Serve as the user-facing voice in discussions of model behavior, risk tradeoffs, and security boundaries.
- Able to engage confidently with AI/ML and engineering teams, asking sharp technical questions, understanding tradeoffs, and connecting user insights to feasibility and system behavior.
- Research Methods & Experimentation
- Use mixed methods to uncover insights, from in-depth interviews and concept tests to survey design and behavioral analysis.
- Co-design experiments with PMs and data scientists to explore key hypotheses in live or staged environments.
- Identify signals in ambiguous or low-data contexts using creative methodological approaches.
- Trust, Ethics & Safety
- Probe how users form trust with AI, especially in sensitive, security-first domains.
- Investigate concerns around data use, autonomy, explainability, and decision boundaries.
- Partner with compliance and responsible AI stakeholders to integrate ethical research practices.
- Technical Fluency in AI Systems
- Understands how generative AI systems work at a foundational level, including LLM training, fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment, and common failure modes.
- Familiar with the factors that shape model behavior (e.g., prompting, guardrails, data pipelines, eval metrics, inference constraints, and human-in-the-loop patterns).
- Comfortable with major types of AI agents and how their architectures impact user interaction and control.
- Contributes meaningfully to discussions about limitations, hallucination risks, and human-AI interaction quality without needing to be an engineer.
- Communication & Influence
- Synthesize complex insights into compelling narratives for both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Contribute to long-range strategic planning through research-backed perspectives.
- Serve as a trusted thought partner across product pillars and business units.
Required Experience & Skills:
- 6+ years of experience in research, ideally with a strong focus on AI, security, or enterprise platforms.
- Proven success in early-stage product research, product-market fit exploration, or strategic assumption testing.
- Foundational understanding of generative AI, model training workflows, and different agent architectures.
- Familiarity with LLM systems, agents, or AI-enhanced workflows — and ability to communicate their workings to non-technical stakeholders.
- Proficiency in a range of research methods (qual + quant), including surveys, concept testing, behavioral observation, and experiment design.
- Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams including engineering, AI/ML, design, and product.
- Deep curiosity, autonomy, and comfort working in ambiguous, 0→1 environments.
Preferred Experience:
- Prior experience in developer tools, identity, or security product environments.
- Understanding of model performance tradeoffs, hallucination risks, and AI system evaluation.
- Familiarity with pricing/value research, product desirability, or adoption analytics.
#LI-Remote
#LI-MM
P24529_3337164
Below is the annual salary range for candidates located in Canada. Your actual salary will depend on factors such as your skills, qualifications, and experience. In addition, Okta offers equity (where applicable), bonus, and benefits, including health, dental, and vision insurance, RRSP with a match, healthcare spending, telemedicine, and paid leave (including PTO and parental leave) in accordance with our applicable plans and policies. To learn more about our Total Rewards program, please visit: https://rewards.okta.com/can.
The annual base salary range for this position for candidates located in Canada is between:$127,000—$191,000 CADWhat you can look forward to as a Full-Time Okta employee!
- Amazing Benefits
- Making Social Impact
- Developing Talent and Fostering Connection + Community at Okta
Okta cultivates a dynamic work environment, providing the best tools, technology and benefits to empower our employees to work productively in a setting that best and uniquely suits their needs. Each organization is unique in the degree of flexibility and mobility in which they work so that all employees are enabled to be their most creative and successful versions of themselves, regardless of where they live. Find your place at Okta today! https://www.okta.com/company/careers/.
Some roles may require travel to one of our office locations for in-person onboarding.
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.
If reasonable accommodation is needed to complete any part of the job application, interview process, or onboarding please use this Form to request an accommodation.
Okta is committed to complying with applicable data privacy and security laws and regulations. For more information, please see our Personnel and Job Candidate Privacy Notice at https://www.okta.com/legal/personnel-policy/.
