Principal Engineer - Identity & Access Management (IAM)

Job Title: Principal Engineer, Identity & Access Management (IAM)
Location: Remote, United States
About The Company
Our client is a large, established financial services organization undergoing significant technology, cybersecurity, and AI transformation. The organization is investing in modern identity capabilities that enable secure adoption of emerging technologies, including Generative AI, Agentic AI, machine identities, autonomous systems, and digital workforce technologies.
The organization offers a highly collaborative environment where senior technical leaders have the opportunity to influence enterprise architecture, cybersecurity strategy, engineering standards, and the future of digital trust across the enterprise.
Job Summary
We are looking for a Principal Engineer, Identity & Access Management (IAM) to provide technical leadership for enterprise identity security strategy within an increasingly AI-enabled organization.
This individual will serve as a senior IAM technical authority, helping shape the future of authentication, authorization, identity governance, privileged access, machine and non-human identities, and identity security for AI agents and autonomous systems.
The Principal Engineer will operate at the intersection of IAM, cybersecurity, AI, enterprise architecture, and product engineering, establishing scalable architectures, reusable patterns, engineering standards, and security guardrails that can be adopted across the enterprise.
Key Responsibilities
Enterprise IAM Strategy: Provide deep technical leadership for enterprise identity security, defining scalable architectures, engineering practices, standards, and controls across human and non-human identities.
Agentic Identity Security: Define how AI agents and autonomous systems are provisioned, authorized, governed, monitored, audited, and decommissioned, including authorization boundaries, delegated authority, accountability, and least-privilege access.
Machine & Non-Human Identity Governance: Develop enterprise strategies for machine identities, service accounts, workload identities, APIs, secrets management, and machine credential lifecycle management.
Modern Identity Architecture: Design next-generation approaches to identity governance, privileged access, authentication, authorization, adaptive authentication, continuous trust, and risk-based access decisions.
AI-Driven Identity Operations: Leverage AI and intelligent automation to improve access reviews, entitlement analysis, role mining, policy recommendations, anomaly detection, and other IAM processes.
Identity Threat Detection: Develop monitoring and detection capabilities for anomalous behavior involving human identities, machine identities, AI agents, and autonomous workflows and integrate those signals into enterprise detection and response processes.
Threat Modeling & Emerging Risk: Provide technical leadership for threat modeling involving AI-enabled attacks, credential abuse, machine identity compromise, synthetic identities, and emerging identity-based threats.
Enterprise Architecture & Engineering: Partner with Engineering, Infrastructure, Cyber Defense, Digital, Data, Product, and Enterprise Architecture teams to embed secure identity capabilities directly into technology solutions.
Technical Standards & Reusable Patterns: Establish secure-by-default engineering patterns, reference architectures, guardrails, and reusable identity capabilities that product and engineering teams can consistently adopt.
Technical & Executive Leadership: Mentor engineers, provide hands-on technical guidance and design reviews, remove complex technical roadblocks, and influence senior leadership regarding identity risk, emerging threats, and required technology investments.
Requirements
Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
Experience: 10+ years of experience in security engineering, Identity & Access Management, security architecture, or a closely related technical discipline.
IAM Expertise: Deep knowledge of modern identity architecture, authentication, authorization, identity governance, privileged access, machine identities, workload identities, and enterprise identity security.
Security Engineering: Demonstrated knowledge of modern threats, attack techniques, detection engineering, threat modeling, incident response, and security operations.
Enterprise Strategy: Proven experience defining and executing enterprise security or identity strategies and evaluating technologies, protocols, practices, and architectural patterns for enterprise adoption.
Technical Leadership: Ability to operate as a hands-on senior technical authority while influencing engineering teams, architects, product leaders, cybersecurity teams, and executive stakeholders.
Other: Ability to work effectively across highly complex enterprise environments and translate emerging technology and security risks into scalable technical solutions.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience with Agentic AI architectures, Generative AI, AI agents, machine identities, non-human identities (NHI), autonomous systems, and AI-enabled workflows is highly preferred.
Experience establishing governance, authorization, accountability, and trust models for autonomous actors is strongly preferred. Familiarity with AI security frameworks and emerging security practices, including OWASP LLM Top 10 and MITRE ATLAS, is beneficial.
Experience implementing adaptive authentication, behavioral analytics, risk-based access, AI-driven security signals, identity threat detection, and automated IAM capabilities is also preferred.
Benefits
Competitive Compensation: Competitive hourly compensation commensurate with Principal-level IAM and security engineering experience.
Health and Wellness: Comprehensive benefits options available during the contract engagement.
Work-Life Balance: Remote U.S.-based opportunity with a collaborative enterprise technology organization.
Professional Development: Opportunity to work on emerging identity-security challenges involving AI agents, machine identities, autonomous systems, and next-generation enterprise IAM.
Additional Perks: Contract-to-hire opportunity, providing the potential to transition into a long-term role with the organization.

Work arrangement
No