Senior Director of Software Engineering - Trust & Security
On-siteNew York, United States
Job Summary
Lead multiple identity, authentication, and customer-access technology programs across departments to drive CIAM modernization, password-less adoption, and developer productivity uplift through AI and automation. Directly manage strategic areas including identity architecture, authentication engineering, developer platform/tooling, and site reliability for CIAM services, ensuring alignment to business outcomes and secure-by-design principles. Provide high-level direction to software engineering and platform teams while overseeing populations across public cloud (AWS) and hybrid environments. Act as the primary interface with senior leaders to drive consensus on security, customer experience, and regulatory compliance needs. Influence peer leaders to adopt IAM standards (SAML, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, FIDO2/WebAuthn) and modernize CI/CD, testing, and incident practices. Champion an AI-augmented engineering culture by defining KPIs for code velocity and MTTR through AI copilots and automated code review. Set the vision for agentic capabilities on the CIAM platform, including autonomous runbooks and policy-as-code validation agents, ensuring safety and auditability.
Required Qualifications
- Formal training or certification on software engineering concepts
- 10+ years applied experience
- 5+ year of experience leading technologists to manage, anticipate and solve complex technical items within your domain of expertise and more broadly across the organization
- Experience developing or leading large or cross-functional teams of technologists, including platform, application, and SRE functions delivering high-availability customer identity services
- Demonstrated prior experience influencing across highly matrixed, complex organizations and delivering value at scale (e.g., enterprise-wide authentication upgrades, CIAM migrations, passwordless rollouts)
- Experience leading complex projects supporting system design, testing, and operational stability, including zero-downtime migrations, blue/green or canary deployments, and rigorous SLIs/SLOs for auth services
- Experience with hiring, developing, and recognizing talent, building succession pipelines, and mentoring engineering leaders and architects
- Extensive practical cloud-native experience, particularly on AWS (e.g., VPC, IAM, KMS, Lambda, ECS/EKS, API Gateway, CloudFront, Route 53, Secrets Manager, Certificate Manager, CloudWatch, WAF), with secure-by-default patterns and cost-aware scaling
- Expertise in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience), with strong systems thinking and familiarity with distributed systems and high-availability design
- Proven ability to deploy AI tools to boost developer productivity and efficiency at scale (e.g., code assistants, AI-based test/data generation, automated code review, defect triage, CI/CD policy agents) with clear metrics and governance
- Hands-on experience architecting and operationalizing agentic systems for CIAM use cases—such as automated certificate lifecycle agents, secrets rotation, configuration drift detection/remediation, and incident response orchestration—integrated with approvals, audit trails, and guardrails
- Deep hands-on understanding of IAM standards and protocols: OAuth 2.0 (including grant types and token lifecycles), OIDC, SAML 2.0, FIDO2, and WebAuthn; ability to set firmwide standards and governance for their adoption
- Security, risk, and compliance fluency for identity: familiarity with NIST SP 800-63 Digital Identity Guidelines and other relevant standard bodies; ability to translate standards into pragmatic policies, controls, and customer experiences
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with CIAM products and ecosystems such as Ping Identity and ForgeRock, including vendor evaluation, integration patterns, migration strategies, and customization via SDKs/gateways
- Background with customer fraud/risk signals and adaptive/authentication orchestration (e.g., step-up MFA, device intelligence, behavioral analytics) integrated into login and transaction flows
- Familiarity with API security best practices (OAuth 2.0 scopes, token introspection, JWT/JWS/JWE, MTLS/OAuth mTLS profiles), gateway patterns, and zero-trust-aligned access strategies
- Experience in observability for identity services (structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics, synthetic monitoring of auth flows) and incident response/forensics for security events
- Good to have hands-on experience and knowledge of modern UI frameworks such as React and Next.js for customer-facing identity flows, consent and profile management, and secure session handling
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