Acceleration Specialist Identity Management (APJ)

Thales; Queenstown; On-site; NZD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Loopio assets

Advanced demos

Field-ready assets

Job summary

Thales in Queenstown, New Zealand seeks a high-impact technical leader to own the technical win in strategic opportunities. You will architect the technical narrative, ensuring quality in tender responses, and act as a force multiplier for regional sales engineering teams.

This role blends identity standards expertise with cross-functional leadership, driving next-generation demos and market Evangelism to shape how Thales wins and scales in CIAM solutions.

Qualifications

• Experience leading technical win strategies for complex deals.
• Ability to architect solutions where product and customer needs diverge.
• Proven track record in delivering high-quality tender narratives.
• Mentor regional SEs and coach teams on technical storytelling.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical response for high-stakes RFPs/RFIs, ensuring accuracy and differentiation.
• Architect solutions for gaps between customer requirements and product capabilities.
• Own the quality standard for tender deliverables and guide improvements.
• Mentor and coach regional SEs to elevate technical writing and strategic thinking.
• Develop and maintain a library of reusable assets and demos for scalable impact.
• Drive growth by showcasing advanced use cases and new features to win opportunities.

Skills

Technical leadership

RFP responses

Solution architecture

Coaching & mentorship

Cross-functional leadership

Product requirements

Vendor demos

QA of narratives

Tools

Loopio

CRM integration

Identity platforms

Job description

The Role at a Glance

We are looking for a high-impact technical leader to own the "technical win" in our most strategic, complex, and competitive opportunities.

This is not a standard pre-sales role. You will be the architect of our technical narrative, the guardian of quality in our tender responses, and the force multiplier that elevates our regional sales engineering teams.

If you thrive at the intersection of deep identity expertise, cross-functional leadership, and business-to-technology discussions, this is your opportunity to shape how we win and how we scale.

Responsibilities

1. Technical Win Strategy

• Lead the technical response for high-stakes RFPs/RFIs, ensuring consistency, accuracy, and competitive differentiation.

• Architect solutions for "grey areas" where product capabilities and customer requirements don't perfectly align, mitigating risk while maximizing scoring potential.

• Perform gap analysis between complex customer needs and current product features, designing workarounds, integration architectures, and tailored demonstrations that bridge the divide.

2. Quality Assurance of the Technical Narrative

• Own the standard of excellence for all tender deliverables, reviewing and refining responses to ensure they are compelling, compliant, and commercially sound.

• Turn the review process into a coaching moment, providing constructive feedback that uplifts the technical writing and strategic thinking of regional SEs.

3. Advanced Asset Repository

• Own and continuously evolve our library of "Gold Standard" assets: customized demonstrations, best-in-class Loopio answer databases, and reusable solution frameworks.

• Package custom work from specific deals into scalable, field-ready assets that raise the baseline competence of the entire organization.

4. Growth Initiatives & Market Evangelism

• Drive new pipeline by showcasing "next-generation” use cases that go beyond standard SE comfort zones.

• Proactively identify market trends and build new "Hero Demos" that open doors with prospective customers.

• Accelerate adoption of new product features, figuring out how to sell them right after their launch to first customer cases and equipping the sales team with technical value propositions early.

5. Mentorship & Coaching

• Elevate the quality of regional SEs through hands-on guidance, template reviews, and one-on-one coaching.

• Foster a pedagogical culture, teaching thewhybehind every fix, not just delivering the answer.

Cross-Functional Leadership

6. Field-to-Product Bridge

• Act as the primary translator between customer-facing teams and Product Management.

• Synthesize the "noise" of feature requests into coherent, business-justified product requirements that influence the roadmap.

• Unblock technical uncertainty by securing definitive commitments from Product Leadership on "Yes," "No," or "Roadmap" decisions—keeping sales teams from making unauthorized promises.

Your Technical Domain

Identity Standards Mastery

• Deep, working knowledge of: OIDC, OAuth 2.0, SAML 2.0, and FIDO2/WebAuthn.

Verification & Compliance

• Expertise in identity proofing workflows (document verification, liveness detection, biometric matching).

• Regulatory fluency in eIDAS v2, PSD2/PSD3, GDPR, and NIST 800-63—with the ability to translate regulatory requirements into technical architecture.

Fraud & Risk Intelligence

• Knowledge of adaptive authentication, behavioral biometrics, and signal orchestration.

• Ability to balance user friction against security posture in real-world deployments.

Authorization Patterns

• Familiarity with fine-grained models (ReBAC, ABAC, PBAC) and complex B2B2C hierarchies (e.g., Delegated Administration).

Ecosystem Integration

• Understanding the landscape of modern web and mobile applications comprehensively and utilizing this knowledge in the context of CIAM platform APIs.

• Using this knowledge to design solution architectures, explain interconnection between different components and build functional demonstrations in AI assisted manner to showcase our capabilities in the actual customer ecosystem (including systems like CRM, LDAP/AD, EntraID, SIEM tools, etc) - and this way articulate how our CIAM solutions fits into broader IT stack of target customer.

Product & Demo Skills

• "Art of the Possible" Demo Architecture:Use Identity Orchestrator to build impactful, customized demos—then standardize them for global field use.

• Roadmap Alignment:Deep understanding of product vision, ongoing NPI activities, and what's GA vs. Roadmap—with the judgment to know when to sell which.

• Competitive Technical Analysis:Deconstruct competitor solutions, identify weaknesses, and ghost-write "trap-setting" questions for tenders.