Staff IAM Engineer

The Role

The Staff IAM Engineer is responsible for securing and managing all non-human identities  including service accounts, application identities, machine credentials, APIs, bots, and workloads across on-prem, cloud, and crypto infrastructure. This role ensures that automated and machine-based identities follow the same governance, lifecycle, and least-privilege principles as human users. You will design systems that enable secure authentication, secrets management, and access provisioning for automated services, APIs, and DevOps pipelines. This role directly protects sensitive financial data, crypto custody environments, and transaction systems from privilege misuse, credential leakage, and insider or supply chain threats.

What You’ll Do

Identity Architecture & Engineering

• Design, implement, and maintain a Non-Human Identity (NHI) framework governing all service accounts, API tokens, certificates, and machine credentials.
• Implement centralized secrets management using tools such as HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager, 
• Build integrations with CI/CD pipelines and cloud services (AWS, GCP, Azure) to enforce automated credential rotation and JIT provisioning.
• Define and implement tagging, ownership, and classification models for non-human identities.
• Develop scalable onboarding processes for applications, workloads, and bots that require secure authentication.

 Lifecycle Management & Governance

• Develop automated workflows for creation, rotation, deactivation, and certification of service accounts and API keys.
• Partner with developers and DevOps to transition hard-coded credentials to secure vaults.
• Establish policies for key rotation frequency, credential expiration, and certificate renewal.
• Integrate NHI lifecycle into IAM governance tools (Okta).
• Support quarterly access reviews and certification campaigns for non-human identities.

 Automation & Integration

• Build automation using APIs, Python, PowerShell, or Terraform to manage credentials and monitor access.
• Integrate non-human identity telemetry into SIEM/SOAR platforms for anomaly detection.
• Implement visibility dashboards to track total NHI inventory, owners, last use, and compliance status.
• Deploy Just-in-Time (JIT) credential provisioning for ephemeral workloads and containers (Kubernetes, Lambda, ECS, etc.).

 Security & Risk Management

• Enforce least privilege and zero-trust principles for machine access.
• Monitor for unused or excessive service accounts and remediate over-permissioned credentials.
• Support incident response teams with forensics on compromised API keys or tokens.
• Define detection logic for credential misuse or non-standard access patterns.
• Partner with Application Security to integrate secure NHI handling into SDLC.

 Compliance & Audit

• Maintain audit trails for credential issuance, usage, and rotation events.
• Produce compliance reports for SOX, SOC 2, PCI DSS, FFIEC, and crypto-custody audits.
• Collaborate with internal audit and compliance teams to validate NHI control effectiveness.
• Document architecture, data flows, SOPs, and exception processes for NHI management.

 Innovation & Continuous Improvement

• Evaluate emerging NHI management solutions (e.g., SPIFFE/SPIRE, workload identity federation, cloud-native secrets stores).
• Lead proof-of-concepts to modernize credentialless or short-lived identity methods.
• Advocate for security automation and the reduction of static credentials across the enterprise.

What You’ll Need

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or related discipline.
• 3–6 years of experience in IAM, DevSecOps, or Security Engineering roles.
• Hands-on experience with non-human identity or secrets management tools
• Familiarity with cloud IAM concepts (AWS IAM Roles, Azure Managed Identities, GCP Service Accounts).
• Experience integrating IAM or secrets systems with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps tools.

 Technical Skills

• Proficiency in automation and scripting (Python, PowerShell, or Bash).
• Strong understanding of authentication standards (OIDC, OAuth 2.0, SAML, JWT).
• Knowledge of API security, key rotation policies, and service-to-service authentication.
• Familiarity with container and workload identities (Kubernetes, ECS, Lambda).
• Understanding of Zero Trust, machine identity, and certificate lifecycle management.

 Preferred Certifications

• HashiCorp Certified Vault Associate
• AWS Certified Security – Specialty
• Okta Certified Professional or Administrator
• (ISC)² Certified Identity and Access Manager (CIAM) or CISSP