Senior Identity Access Specialist

We're Hiring: Senior Identity Access Specialist
Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)
Employment Type: Full-Time
Experience Level: Senior
Work Arrangement: Fully Remote
About Us
We are a globally focused organization committed to protecting digital identities, applications, infrastructure, data, and business operations across diverse markets. Our teams collaborate across Cybersecurity, IT, Infrastructure, Applications, Cloud, Human Resources, Risk, Compliance, and external technology partners to maintain secure and efficient access to organizational resources.
We focus on modern identity and access-management practices that strengthen security, simplify user access, enforce least privilege, improve governance, and provide reliable identity services across cloud, hybrid, and enterprise environments.
The Role
We are seeking an experienced Senior Identity Access Specialist to lead identity and access-management operations, access governance, authentication, authorization, privileged access, identity lifecycle management, and continuous improvement of enterprise identity services.
The ideal candidate will combine strong IAM expertise with practical knowledge of directory services, single sign-on, federation, privileged access management, access reviews, identity governance, cloud identity, and security controls. The role will work closely with Security, IT, HR, Application, Infrastructure, and business teams to ensure users receive appropriate access while maintaining strong security and compliance standards.
Key Responsibilities
Develop and implement identity and access-management strategies aligned with organizational security objectives.
Manage enterprise identity lifecycle processes from onboarding through role changes, transfers, and offboarding.
Establish and maintain identity provisioning, modification, suspension, and deprovisioning processes.
Ensure user access is granted according to approved roles, responsibilities, and business requirements.
Implement and maintain role-based access control and least-privilege principles.
Develop and maintain identity governance standards, procedures, workflows, and operating controls.
Manage user identities across on-premises, cloud, hybrid, and SaaS environments.
Administer and optimize directory services and enterprise identity platforms.
Manage Microsoft Entra ID, Active Directory, or equivalent identity platforms where applicable.
Configure and maintain single sign-on solutions across enterprise applications.
Implement and manage SAML, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, LDAP, and other identity protocols.
Manage identity federation between internal systems, cloud platforms, SaaS applications, and external partners.
Configure and maintain multi-factor authentication and adaptive authentication policies.
Support passwordless authentication, conditional access, device-based authentication, and risk-based access controls where applicable.
Develop authentication policies that balance security, usability, and business requirements.
Manage privileged accounts and administrative access across infrastructure, applications, databases, cloud platforms, and critical systems.
Work with Privileged Access Management solutions to control, monitor, rotate, and audit privileged credentials.
Establish just-in-time and just-enough-access controls where appropriate.
Monitor privileged-account activity and investigate inappropriate or anomalous administrative access.
Conduct periodic access reviews and certification campaigns for applications, systems, privileged accounts, and sensitive resources.
Coordinate access certification activities with business owners, managers, system owners, and application administrators.
Identify excessive, outdated, duplicate, orphaned, or inappropriate access.
Ensure access is removed promptly when users leave the organization or no longer require access.
Maintain accurate identity records, account inventories, role assignments, entitlement catalogs, and access histories.
Develop and maintain role and entitlement models for critical applications.
Support segregation-of-duties requirements and identify potentially conflicting access combinations.
Work with Risk and Compliance teams to address identity-related control requirements.
Support internal and external audits involving identity, access, authentication, and privileged accounts.
Maintain evidence for access reviews, provisioning, deprovisioning, privileged access, authentication controls, and security exceptions.
Investigate access-related security incidents, authentication anomalies, unauthorized access, and policy violations.
Support incident-response teams during account compromise, credential theft, privilege escalation, and identity-related incidents.
Analyze identity logs and authentication events to identify suspicious access behavior.
Develop identity-security monitoring and alerting requirements.
Implement controls for dormant, inactive, service, shared, generic, and non-human accounts.
Establish governance for service accounts, application identities, machine identities, API credentials, and other non-human identities.
Coordinate certificate, secret, token, and credential lifecycle management with relevant technical teams.
Support cloud identity and access controls across infrastructure, applications, data platforms, and development environments.
Ensure identity policies are appropriately integrated with cloud security and zero-trust architectures.
Support identity integration with HR systems, IT service-management platforms, applications, directories, and security tools.
Automate identity provisioning and access-management workflows using APIs, orchestration, scripts, or workflow platforms.
Reduce manual access-management activities through automation and standardized approval processes.
Develop and maintain IAM integrations with enterprise applications and SaaS platforms.
Support identity-platform upgrades, migrations, implementations, and technology transformations.
Participate in IAM architecture reviews and provide recommendations for identity platforms, integrations, and security controls.
Define technical requirements for new applications requiring authentication, authorization, federation, or automated provisioning.
Validate identity controls during application onboarding and technology changes.
Manage IAM-related incidents, service requests, access exceptions, and escalations.
Key Performance Indicators
Identity platform availability
User provisioning turnaround time
User deprovisioning completion time
Access-request processing time
Access-request SLA compliance
Automated provisioning rate
Automated deprovisioning rate
Provisioning success rate
Provisioning failure rate
Identity synchronization accuracy
Access certification completion rate
Access-review exception rate
Excessive-access remediation rate
Orphaned-account remediation rate
Dormant-account remediation rate
Privileged-account review completion
Privileged-access policy compliance
Privileged credential rotation compliance
Just-in-time access adoption
Least-privilege compliance
Role-based access coverage
Segregation-of-duties compliance
MFA adoption rate
Passwordless authentication adoption
Authentication success rate
Authentication failure rate
SSO adoption rate
Identity federation availability
Conditional-access policy compliance
Unauthorized access incidents
Identity-related security incidents
Account-compromise detection rate
Identity incident response time
Access exception resolution time
Service-account governance coverage
Non-human identity inventory accuracy
Service-account review completion
Access-policy compliance
Audit finding rate
IAM control remediation rate
IAM change success rate
Identity integration delivery performance
Application onboarding time
IAM automation coverage
Identity data quality
Identity-platform synchronization performance
Stakeholder satisfaction
IAM documentation completeness
Security and compliance assessment performance
Ideal Candidate
The successful candidate should have strong experience in identity and access management, IAM operations, identity governance, privileged access management, authentication, directory services, or cybersecurity, preferably within a complex enterprise, multinational, financial, technology, or highly regulated environment.
The candidate should demonstrate:
Strong understanding of identity and access-management principles and security practices.
Proven experience managing enterprise IAM environments.
Strong knowledge of identity lifecycle management and joiner, mover, and leaver processes.
Experience implementing role-based access control and least-privilege models.
Strong knowledge of Microsoft Entra ID, Active Directory, LDAP, or equivalent directory technologies.
Experience with single sign-on and identity federation.
Strong knowledge of SAML, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, LDAP, and related identity protocols.
Experience implementing and managing multi-factor authentication.

Work arrangement
Yes