IAM Engineering Leader

Senior Manager, IAM Engineering

Identify Security

Miami-Fort Lauderdale Area | South Florida presence required

Contract-to-Direct | Confidential Search

U.S. Citizen or Green Card holder only | No visa sponsorship

If you have spent years designing and implementing complex workforce identity systems — and later became the leader IAM engineers call when those systems get complicated — this may be worth a conversation.

I’m supporting a confidential search for a Senior Manager, IAM Engineering to lead a workforce IAM engineering team while remaining close enough to the technology to challenge designs, solve difficult implementation problems, and develop stronger engineers.

+ This is not a governance-only role.

+ It is not primarily vendor management.

+ It is not a “manage SailPoint and certifications” position.

+ The company needs a true player-coach who understands what happens when HR-driven lifecycle, provisioning, directories, federation, applications, APIs, entitlements, PAM, and automation all have to work together in production.

Specific products can be learned. The engineering judgment that comes from building complex workforce identity solutions needs to already be there.

The Need

The IAM Director needs a senior engineering leader who can:

• Lead and develop IAM engineers
• Stay technically involved in architecture, design, implementation, and troubleshooting
• Challenge weak designs before they become production problems
• Help engineers solve difficult provisioning, lifecycle, federation, and integration issues
• Establish repeatable engineering patterns rather than one-off solutions
• Improve platform reliability and reduce manual IAM work
• Build stronger internal engineering capability
• Reduce dependence on vendors for technical thinking
• Communicate complex identity problems clearly across engineering, infrastructure, applications, business teams, and security leadership

Core Engineering Background

The strongest candidates will have personally designed and implemented complex workforce

IAM solutions involving several of these areas:

• Joiner, mover, leaver lifecycle automation
• HR-driven identity provisioning and deprovisioning
• Enterprise directories and identity correlation
• Role, attribute, and entitlement management
• Application onboarding and downstream provisioning
• REST APIs, connectors, schemas, mappings, and reconciliation
• ServiceNow-driven access and approval workflows
• Microsoft Entra ID / Azure AD
• Ping IDM / ForgeRock IDM or comparable identity-management platforms
• Ping AM or comparable authentication/access-management platforms
• SSO, MFA, federation, SAML, OAuth, OIDC, and SCIM
• Provisioning failures, lifecycle exceptions, and production troubleshooting
• Custom integrations when native connectors or vendor capabilities are not enough
• Automation, scripting, APIs, or code review
• PAM, privileged access, JIT access, and least privilege

You should be able to explain not only what platform you used , but what you personally designed, implemented, challenged, fixed, or helped your engineers solve.

You Have Probably Solved Problems Like These:

+ An employee starts, but downstream access does not arrive on time.

+ A role or attribute change produces the wrong entitlement.

+ A termination event fails to remove access from one or more applications.

+ Identity data becomes inconsistent between HR, directories, IAM platforms, and downstream systems.

+ A native connector cannot support the business requirement, forcing a custom API or different engineering pattern.

+ A provisioning process works in testing but fails under production complexity.

+ A strong engineer proposes a technically clean design that will create operational problems six months later.

These are the kinds of problems this leader needs to understand firsthand.

People Leadership Matters

This is not simply a senior architect role.

You need experience directly leading and developing engineers .

The right person can point to engineers who became stronger because of their leadership -- better architects, better troubleshooters, better decision-makers, and more capable of solving complex identity problems independently.

You should be comfortable reviewing designs, asking difficult technical questions, coaching engineers through tradeoffs, and stepping into a problem when the team gets stuck.

Additional Identity Experience

Broader identity-platform experience is valuable, especially in areas such as:

• Non-human identities and service accounts
• Workload identity
• Cloud identity
• Zero Trust
• AI agents and delegated access
• Token-based authorization
• Identity observability
• Security automation

But these capabilities do not replace deep workforce IAM engineering experience .

The ideal candidate built their foundation in workforce identity and later expanded into these newer identity domains.

What You Will Do

• Lead and develop IAM engineers in the South Florida organization
• Partner closely with the IAM Director on architecture, standards, priorities, and execution
• Review designs and help solve difficult identity engineering problems
• Improve workforce identity lifecycle and provisioning
• Establish repeatable patterns for application onboarding and identity integration
• Improve integrations across Ping / ForgeRock, Entra, ServiceNow, PAM, directories, and enterprise applications
• Coach engineers and raise technical judgment across the team
• Reduce operational friction and unnecessary manual work
• Build more IAM engineering capability internally
• Help prepare the organization for non-human identities, automation, and AI-agent access patterns

The Right Background

You are likely someone who started as an identity builder and grew into an engineering leader .

You have led engineers, but you never completely left the engineering behind.

You can still understand why a provisioning flow failed, challenge an integration architecture, review an API or automation approach, troubleshoot federation problems, and recognize when a design will become difficult to operate.

You also know how to make engineers better.

This Is Probably Not the Right Role If Your Background Is Mainly

• IAM governance, access reviews, or certifications
• SailPoint or Saviynt administration without broader engineering depth
• Vendor-led implementations where third parties perform most of the engineering
• Program or delivery management without recent technical ownership
• Broad cybersecurity leadership with IAM as only one responsibility
• Authentication or SSO without meaningful workforce lifecycle/provisioning experience
• IAM operations without architecture and integration depth
• Pure strategy without implementation experience
• People management where you are no longer technically close to the work
• Senior IC work without meaningful experience developing engineers

Logistics

Location: Miami-Fort Lauderdale / South Florida

Work arrangement: Remote-to-onsite transition

Employment type: Contract-to-Direct

Conversion path: Full-time employment

Work authorization: U.S. Citizen or Green Card holder only; no visa sponsorship

Message me directly if you have personally built complex workforce IAM solutions, grew into engineering leadership, and still stay close enough to the technology to help strong engineers solve difficult identity problems.