Principal Security Architect, Active Directory & Entra ID Backup and Recovery

About AvePoint:
Beyond Secure. AvePoint is the global leader in data security, governance, and resilience, going beyond traditional solutions to ensure a robust data foundation and enable organizations everywhere to collaborate with confidence. Over 25,000 customers worldwide rely on the AvePoint Confidence Platform to prepare, secure, and optimize their critical data across Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and other collaboration environments. AvePoint’s global channel partner program includes approximately 5,000 managed service providers, value-added resellers, and systems integrators, with our solutions available in more than 100 cloud marketplaces. To learn more, visit www.avepoint.com.
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About the position:
The Principal Architect for Active Directory & Entra ID Backup and Recovery will be the foundational technical leader for AvePoint's hybrid identity resilience build strategy. This role is focused on the architecture of backup, restore, rollback, and disaster recovery capabilities for Active Directory (AD), Microsoft Entra ID, and hybrid AD/Entra environments.
This is a hands-on, deeply technical architecture role. The person in this role will define how AvePoint captures identity state, protects AD and Entra configuration, restores objects and attributes, handles hybrid source-of-authority rules, and supports complex enterprise topologies such as multi-domain forests, multiple forests, trusts, and Entra Connect / Cloud Sync environments.
This role is intentionally not the primary owner for AD/Entra threat detection, alert rule authoring, SIEM content, or incident response strategy. AvePoint expects to hire a separate AD/Entra security-focused role for ITDR and security detection. The architect in this role will partner closely with that security role, but the core responsibility here is the backup and recovery architecture: how to safely protect and restore Microsoft identity systems when disaster occurs.
The ideal candidate has built, operated, or deeply influenced Active Directory and Entra ID backup/recovery products or services, ideally at a vendor that protects AD, Entra ID, hybrid identity, or directory services at enterprise scale. They should be comfortable with both the low-level realities of AD recovery and the product engineering tradeoffs required to ship a scalable SaaS backup and recovery platform.
Specific responsibilities include, but are not limited to:
Own the end-to-end technical architecture for Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID backup, restore, rollback, and disaster recovery capabilities.
Define the architecture for protecting AD objects, attributes, group memberships, OUs, GPOs, DNS-related state, SYSVOL, domain controllers, forest metadata, trust relationships, and other recovery-critical directory components.
Design restore workflows for object-level, attribute-level, group membership, OU, GPO, domain controller, and forest-level recovery, with clear sequencing, validation, retry, and rollback behavior.
Architect support for enterprise AD topologies, including single-domain/single-forest, multi-domain/single-forest, multi-forest, account/resource forest, forest trust, and hybrid AD-to-Entra scenarios.
Design the AD collection and backup model, including full-state snapshots, incremental change capture, LDAP/DirSync or equivalent mechanisms, event correlation where useful, system state / VSS considerations, and backup metadata required for reliable recovery.
Define the hybrid source-of-authority model for AD-synced and cloud-only objects, including Entra Connect / Cloud Sync behavior, sourceAnchor / ImmutableID mapping, hard-match and soft-match considerations, and recovery sequencing when AD is authoritative.
Extend AvePoint's existing Entra ID protection strategy into a coherent hybrid recovery architecture that understands which objects and settings should be restored in AD first, Entra first, or only in the cloud.