Staff UX Researcher, AI & Emerging Products

About Okta

Okta is The World’s Identity Company, empowering everyone to safely use any technology, anywhere, on any device or app. Our Okta Platform and Auth0 Platform offer secure access, authentication, and automation, making identity central to business security and growth. We value diverse perspectives and are looking for lifelong learners who bring unique experiences to our team. Join us in building a world where Identity belongs to you.

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Staff UX Researcher, AI & Emerging Products to shape the future of AI-driven security products at Auth0. This is a highly strategic role focused on deeply understanding user needs, validating assumptions for AI-powered solutions, and ensuring product-market fit, trust, and adoption. You will collaborate closely with engineers, AI researchers, product managers, and designers to ground LLM-based and agentic systems in human needs, ensure security by design, and align with business viability. This position requires a unique blend of user research expertise, market understanding, strategic foresight, and technical fluency in AI product development.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Product-Market Fit and Assumption Validation: Lead research to test assumptions regarding user behavior, trust, mental models, and adoption of AI security tools. Explore early-stage concepts to assess needs, barriers, and potential monetization, providing insights that shape long-term product direction for AI capabilities.
• Human-AI Interaction Research: Design and execute studies exploring user perception, trust, and interaction with LLMs, agents, and autonomous systems. Investigate failure modes, expectations, and control preferences in high-risk domains like identity and security, balancing automation with human agency.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration with AI & Engineering: Partner with AI engineers, product managers, and designers to understand technical foundations such as prompting strategies, model capabilities, and hallucination risks. Translate user insights into actionable guidance and serve as the user-facing voice in discussions on model behavior, risk tradeoffs, and security boundaries. Engage confidently with AI/ML and engineering teams, asking sharp technical questions and connecting user insights to feasibility and system behavior.
• Research Methods & Experimentation: Employ mixed methods, including in-depth interviews, concept tests, survey design, and behavioral analysis, to uncover insights. Co-design experiments with PMs and data scientists to test key hypotheses in live or staged environments, identifying signals in ambiguous or low-data contexts using creative methodological approaches.
• Trust, Ethics & Safety: Investigate how users build trust with AI, particularly in sensitive, security-first domains. Probe concerns around data use, autonomy, explainability, and decision boundaries, partnering with compliance and responsible AI stakeholders to integrate ethical research practices.
• Technical Fluency in AI Systems: Understand generative AI systems at a foundational level, including LLM training, fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment, and common failure modes. Be familiar with factors shaping model behavior (e.g., prompting, guardrails, data pipelines, eval metrics, inference constraints, human-in-the-loop patterns) and major types of AI agents. Contribute 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 research-backed perspectives to long-range strategic planning and serve as a trusted thought partner across product pillars and business units.

Required Experience & Skills

• 6+ years of experience in research, 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 (qualitative + quantitative), 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.

Key skills/competency

• User Research
• AI Product Strategy
• Human-AI Interaction
• Product-Market Fit
• Generative AI
• LLM Systems
• Security Products
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Mixed Methods Research
• Ethical AI