Identity & Access Platform Leader

Nscale; New York (NY); On-site; USD 230,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Flexible paid time off

Parental leave

Retirement plan participation

Job summary

Nscale is hiring a Director of Identity to lead the engineering function for authentication, authorisation, and identity propagation across the platform. You will own end-to-end outcomes, hire and grow a high-performing team, and ensure a secure sign-in experience and auditable access control.

You’ll drive architecture decisions and collaborate with Product, Platform, and Security to ship secure patterns by default, while maintaining reliability and performance at scale in a cloud environment.

Qualifications

• Senior technical leadership with Staff+ / Principal level experience or equivalent.
• Experience hiring, leading, and developing engineering teams with strong delivery and operational standards.
• Deep experience with authentication and authorisation systems (OAuth 2.0/OIDC, RBAC/ABAC, token exchange, JWT/JWKS, policy engines such as OPA/Cedar).
• Hands-on experience designing and operating scalable production systems on major cloud providers (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Ability to work with Security, Product, and Engineering leadership to translate discussions into measurable deliverables.
• Ability to turn ambiguous goals into practical, high-impact deliverables.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end identity experience and security posture across the platform and drive roadmap feedback loops.
• Set the multi-year Identity strategy, organisational design, and delivery approach; manage budget and headcount.
• Establish standards for identity usage across services to reduce bespoke integrations and enforce guardrails—ensuring adherence.
• Make the secure path the easy path with opinionated primitives, strong defaults, and safety rails.
• Ensure high reliability, performance, and latency, with safe incremental releases and rapid recovery.
• Represent Identity in architectural discussions with Product, Platform, Infrastructure, SRE, and Security, aligning stakeholders.

Skills

Senior leadership

Identity domain expertise

Distributed systems

Security-minded design

Communication & influence

Bias for action

Leadership & hiring

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Pulumi

OAuth/OIDC

JWT/JWKS

NATS

Kafka

Job description

Nscale is hiring a Director of Identity to lead the engineering function for authentication, authorisation, and identity propagation across the platform. You will own end-to-end outcomes, hire and grow a high-performing team, and ensure a secure sign-in experience and auditable access control.

You’ll drive architecture decisions and collaborate with Product, Platform, and Security to ship secure patterns by default, while maintaining reliability and performance at scale in a cloud environment.