Identity & Access Management Architect

We’re working with a highly technical firm in the financial industry that is investing in its cybersecurity capability, with identity forming a key part of that journey.

They’re now looking for an Identity & Access Management Architect to help shape a broad identity programme and mature the way identity is designed and implemented across the organisation.

The technology environment is complex, fast-moving and highly engineering-led, so IAM has to do more than meet security requirements. It needs to work at scale, support different technology environments and enable engineering teams to move quickly without introducing unnecessary risk.

This is an opportunity to influence how identity is approached across the organisation, while staying close enough to the technology to see your decisions put into practice.

The Role

You’ll take a leading role in shaping the firm’s identity architecture, working directly with security, developers and infrastructure teams to understand what they’re building, solve identity challenges and turn security requirements into practical technical solutions.

This is a technically engaged architecture role where you’ll remain closely involved in how solutions are designed and implemented, rather than sitting several layers away from the technology.

You will:

• Design and evolve Identity & Access Management platforms across a complex technology estate.
• Develop secrets management capabilities for applications, services and infrastructure.
• Shape user-to-service and service-to-service authentication.
• Build identity provider and federation capabilities using OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect and SAML.
• Design fine-grained and policy-based authorisation aligned with least privilege and Zero Trust.
• Create IAM standards and reusable patterns that engineering teams can work with.
• Assess the existing identity landscape, identify gaps and determine where capabilities need to mature.
• Work across cloud, application and platform security where identity forms part of wider technical challenges.
• Technical depth matters in this role. We’re looking for someone who understands IAM beyond products and high-level architecture, and can confidently get into the detail of authentication flows, protocols, infrastructure and how identity services behave in production.

We’re looking for someone who:

• Has strong experience designing and implementing Identity & Access Management solutions in complex environments.
• Brings deep knowledge of authentication, authorisation and secrets management.
• Has a strong understanding of OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML and modern identity architectures.
• Has experience working across Linux/Unix, networking, cloud and Kubernetes/container environments.
• Can read and write Python.
• Is confident working directly with experienced engineers, challenging approaches and explaining the security trade-offs behind technical decisions.
• Can move comfortably between detailed technical conversations and the broader architectural picture.

Experience with Terraform, Ansible or security/infrastructure-as-code would be useful, as would experience in highly engineered, research-led or low-latency environments.

Financial services experience would be valuable, but the technical environments you’ve worked in and the IAM challenges you’ve solved will carry greater weight.

For someone who enjoys getting into the technical detail while influencing the direction of an identity programme, this role offers significant scope to make an impact.

This opportunity is also open to Identity and Access Management Engineers.