Director, Customer Identity and Access Management

nscaleoperationsukltd; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Nscale is seeking a Director of Identity to lead the engineering function responsible for authentication, authorization, and identity propagation across the platform. You will shape strategy, hire and grow an exceptional team, and own end-to-end outcomes including secure sign-in, auditable access control, and secure-by-default patterns.

The role combines technical depth with organizational leadership, requiring cross-functional collaboration with Product, Platform, Infrastructure, SRE, and

Qualifications

• Senior technical leadership with experience hiring and scaling engineering teams.
• Deep domain expertise in authentication and authorization systems (OAuth 2.0/OIDC, RBAC/ABAC).
• Experience designing distributed systems on major cloud providers (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Ability to influence Security, Product, and Engineering leaders and align stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end identity experience and security posture across the platform.
• Set multi-year Identity strategy, organizational design, and delivery approach; manage budget and headcount.

Skills

Senior technical leadership

Identity domain expertise

Distributed systems & cloud fluency

Communication and influence

Tools

OAuth 2.0 / OIDC

JWT/JWKS

OPA/Cedar

Job description

About the role

Nscale is hiring a Director of Identity to lead the engineering function accountable for authentication, authorisation, and identity propagation across the platform - for humans, agents, and workloads . Identity sits on the critical path of every API call and every Console, SDK, or CLI action: when we are slow, the platform is slow; when we are wrong, we create significant security and reputational risk.

This is a high impact role with scope across Product, Platform, Infrastructure, SRE, and Security. You will set direction, hire and grow a high-performing team, and own end-to-end outcomes: a secure sign-in experience, consistent and auditable access control, and a paved road that makes secure patterns the default.

You'll operate as a player-coach: technically deep enough to make high-leverage architectural calls, and organisationally strong enough to align stakeholders and ship iteratively without compromising correctness.

What you'll work on

• Authentication & federation: login/session flows, token issuance and exchange, key management, identity verification, and enterprise federation (SSO, SCIM, group/role sync, outbound federation).
• Authorisation & policy: RBAC/ABAC models, policy definition and enforcement, permission resolution services, and scalable guardrails.
• Propagation & workload identity: standardised identity headers/claims, service-to-service identity, workload identity, and secure delegation patterns.
• Paved roads: shared libraries, SDKs, middleware, docs, and compatibility contracts that make secure patterns the default.
• Operational trust: reliability/latency discipline, safe incremental releases, incident response, observability, and auditability/evidence generation.

Responsibilities

• Mission outcomes. Own the end-to-end identity experience and security posture across the platform, and the feedback loops that drive the roadmap.
• Org leadership & operating model. Set the multi-year Identity strategy, organisational design, and delivery approach; accountable for org-wide delivery, budget, and headcount. Hire and develop engineers and managers, build a leadership bench, and create the structure that enables the function to scale.
• Platform coherency. Establish standards and patterns for identity usage across all services and product surfaces, reducing bespoke integrations and inconsistent permission models - with proactive detection to ensure adherence.
• Security-by-default. Make the secure path the easy path: opinionated primitives, strong defaults, and guardrails that prevent classes of mistakes.
• Reliability & performance. Hold a high bar for correctness, availability, and latency on the systems that gate every request. Ensure rollout safety and fast recovery.
• Cross-functional alignment. Represent Identity in architectural and roadmap conversations with Product, Platform, Infrastructure, SRE, and Security - resolving trade-offs and ensuring decisions stick when you are not in the room.
• Industry awareness. Stay abreast of identity, security, and cloud industry direction - and translate relevant shifts (standards, vendor roadmaps, regulatory changes, and threats) into pragmatic platform improvements.
• Metrics & accountability. Define and track the KPIs that matter: authentication success rate, authz decision latency, incident rate/MTTR, adoption of shared libraries, policy coverage, and access review hygiene.
• Sovereignty & key custody. Ensure our identity and key-management posture supports sovereignty requirements (where needed), with clear controls and evidence for where keys and trust roots are held and operated.

Requirements

• Senior technical leadership. Staff+ / Principal engineering background (or equivalent), with the ability to challenge designs across distributed systems, security boundaries, and the full stack.
• Track record leading teams. Experience hiring, leading, and developing engineering teams with strong delivery and operational standards.
• Identity domain expertise. Deep experience with authentication and authorisation systems (e.g., OAuth 2.0/OIDC, RBAC/ABAC, token exchange, JWT/JWKS, policy engines such as OPA/Cedar, Zanzibar-style patterns).
• Distributed systems & cloud fluency. Hands-on experience designing, building, and operating scalable production systems for or on a major cloud provider (AWS/GCP/Azure), including day-2 operations.
• Critical-path discipline. Comfort working on systems with large blast radius - rollback plans, incremental delivery, and correctness guarantees - while preserving release momentum and navigating one-way-door decisions when they arise.
• Communication and influence. Ability to work with Security, Product, and Engineering leadership, extract signal from design partner conversations, and translate it into measurable de