Senior Active Directory Engineer - Mergers, Acquisitions & Divestitures

Cencora, Inc.; Carrollton (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Cencora, Inc. is hiring a Senior Active Directory Engineer to design and execute identity workstreams for acquisitions. You will assess environments, migrate, consolidate, and ensure secure, auditable, reversible connections across forests.

This hands-on role collaborates with IT leadership, Security, Legal, and IMO to deliver Day-1 readiness and ongoing consolidation, often under tight timelines.

Qualifications

• 8+ years engineering enterprise AD in multi-domain/multi-forest environments.
• Proven M&A identity workstream leadership; divestiture experience a plus.
• Hands-on with AD migration tools: ADMT, Migration tools, Entra Connect.
• Deep knowledge of cross-forest design, selective authentication, SID history.
• Experience consolidating forests and inter-forest migrations (>1,000 users).
• Strong AD security expertise: tiered admin, PAM/PAW, Kerberos hardening.
• DNS, DHCP, GPO, Sites & Services, replication, PKI/ADCS.
• PowerShell for automation and bulk ops.
• Experience with hybrid identity and tenant migrations.
• Excellent communication with executives and legal stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead acquisition identity integration from pre-close to Day-1 reality.
• Design consolidation and coexistence across forests; manage migrations in waves.
• Remediate objects, plan DNS/DHCP/PKI migrations, and cutover services.
• Deliver Day-1 capabilities: cross-organization visibility, SSO access.
• Maintain runbooks, provide Tier 3 support, mentor engineers.
• Address security, risk, and regulatory requirements during integration.

Skills

8+ years AD experience

M&A experience

Migration tools

ADMT

Entra Connect

ShareGate

BitTitan

Semperis

Cross-forest design

SID history

Inter-forest migrations

AD security

DNS/DHCP

GPO

PKI/ADCS

PowerShell

Entra ID

Hybrid identity

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in IT/CS

Tools

Quest / Binary Tree On Demand Migration

Migration Manager

ADMT

Entra Connect / Cloud Sync

ShareGate

BitTitan

Semperis

Job description

Our team members are at the heart of everything we do. At Cencora, we are united in our responsibility to create healthier futures, and every person here is essential to us being able to deliver on that purpose. If you want to make a difference at the center of health, come join our innovative company and help us improve the lives of people and animals everywhere.

Job Details

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Active Directory Engineer to design and build the identity workstreams of our acquisition activity. You will assess newly acquired environments, then design and execute the migration, consolidation, and coexistence of directory environments across multiple forests, making sure that every connection between two organizations is secure, auditable, and reversible. Including similar tasks for divestitures.

This is a hands-on role. You will work with IT leadership, Security, Legal, and the Integration Management Office to deliver Day-1 readiness and long-term identity consolidation, often on compressed timelines.

Key Responsibilities

Acquisition Identity Integration

• Perform pre-close and post-close discovery and assessment of acquired environments: forest and domain structure, trusts, GPOs, schema state, DNS, PKI, service accounts, privileged access, and technical debt.
• Design the path to consolidate acquired forests into a target forest, including temporary coexistence (trusts, federation) needed to bridge Day-1 until migration is complete. Flag the exceptions where consolidation is not advisable (e.g., regulatory separation, unsupported legacy apps).
• Plan and execute inter-forest migrations of users, groups, computers, and service accounts, including SID history, password migration/sync, workstation re-joins and profile migration, and resource access cutover in waves.
• Remediate and rationalize acquired objects before migration: naming collisions, UPN/email suffix conflicts, stale accounts, duplicate groups, and nested-group sprawl.
• Migrate or rebuild dependent services: DNS zones, DHCP, file servers/shares and ACLs, ADCS/PKI, application service accounts, and LDAP/Kerberos-dependent apps.
• Deliver Day-1 capabilities such as cross-company email/calendar visibility, collaboration access, and SSO to shared applications.
• Run long-term consolidation including forest and domain decommissioning: SID history cleanup, GPO and naming standardization, and removal of legacy trusts, DCs, and stale objects.
• Handle tenant-to-tenant coordination with the messaging and collaboration teams.
• Keep a repeatable acquisition integration playbook current and improve it after each deal.

Divestitures & Separations

• Support divestitures: dependency mapping, entitlement cleanup, and Transition Service Agreement (TSA) identity support.
• Decommission shared trusts and sync connections at TSA exit.

Security & Risk

• Assess the security posture of acquired environments before any connection is made (AD health, privileged account exposure, legacy protocols, unpatched DCs).
• Design secure connectivity between companies: selective-authentication trusts, network segmentation, tiered administration, and least-privilege access.
• Remediate common AD attack paths (Kerberoasting, unconstrained delegation, AdminSDHolder abuse, weak ADCS templates, excessive Domain Admin membership).
• Partner with Security/SOC on monitoring, logging, and incident response during integration.
• Support audit, compliance, and regulatory requirements (SOX, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, as applicable).

Operations & Documentation

• Maintain runbooks, cutover plans, rollback plans, and post-migration validation checklists.
• Provide Tier 3 support for complex AD, DNS, DHCP, GPO, and PKI issues.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to standards and automation.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience engineering enterprise Active Directory in multi-domain / multi-forest environments.
• Demonstrated M&A experience: at least [2-3] completed acquisitions or mergers where you personally led or executed the identity workstream. Divestiture experience is a plus.
• Hands‑on experience with AD migration tools, such as:

• Quest / Binary Tree On Demand Migration or Migration Manager

• Microsoft Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT)

• Microsoft Entra Connect / Cloud Sync

• Other third‑party tools (e.g., Quest, ShareGate, BitTitan, Semperis, CoreView, or equivalent)

• Deep knowledge of trust types and cross‑forest design, including selective authentication, SID filtering, SID history, and quarantine.

• Proven experience consolidating acquired forests into a single target forest (inter‑forest migrations of at least [1,000+] users), including decommissioning the source forest.

• Strong understanding of AD security: tiered administration model, PAM/PAW, LAPS, Kerberos/NTLM hardening, ADCS security, and AD attack and defense techniques.

• Strong working knowledge of DNS, DHCP, GPO, Sites & Services, replication, and PKI/ADCS.

• Advanced PowerShell scripting for automation, reporting, and bulk operations.

• Experience with hybrid identity: Microsoft Entra ID, Entra Connect, tenant‑to‑tenant migration, and Conditional Access.

• Excellent communication skills; able to explain risk and tradeoffs to executives, legal, and non‑technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with tenant‑to‑tenant migrations in Microsoft 365 (Exchange, Teams, SharePoint/OneDrive).

• Familiarity with identity security tooling: Microsoft Defender for Identity, Semperis DSP, Tenable AD, PingCastle, BloodHound (defensive use).

• Experience with federation and SSO (AD FS, SAML, OIDC, Ping, Okta) between organizations.

• Experience with Day‑1 / Day‑100 integration planning and working alongside an IMO; exposure to Transition Service Agreements (TSAs) is a plus.

• Exposure to PAM tools (CyberArk, BeyondTrust, Delinea) and IGA (SailPoint, Saviynt).

• Experience with ITIL / change management in regulated environments.

• Relevant certifications: Microsoft (AZ‑500, SC‑300, MS‑102), CISSP, GIAC (GCWN, GPPA), or similar.

• Bachelor's degree in IT, Computer Science, or equivalent experience.

Working Conditions

• Occasional travel to acquired sites: [x%]
• On‑call and weekend cutover work is expected during migrations.
• [Security clearance / background check requirements, if any]

What Cencora offers

We provide compensation, benefits, and resources that enable a highly inclusive culture and support our team members' ability to live with purpose every day. In addition to traditional offerings like medical, dental, and vision care, we also provide a comprehensive suite of benefits that focus on the physical, emotional, financial, and social aspects of wellness. This encompasses support for working families, which may include backup dependent care, adoption assistance, infertility coverage, family building support, behavioral health solutions, paid parental leave, and paid caregiver leave. To encourage your personal growth, we also offer a variety of training programs, professional development resources, and opportunities to participate in mentorship programs, employee resource groups, volunteer activities, and much more. For details, visit https://www.virtualfairhub.com/cencora

Full time

Equal Employment Opportunity

Cencora is committed to providing equal employment opportunity without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or membership in any other class protected by federal, state or local law.

The company's continued success depends on the full and effective utilization of qualified individuals. Therefore, harassment is prohibited and all matters related to recruiting, training, compensation, benefits, promotions and transfers comply with equal opportunity principles and are non‑discriminatory.

Cencora is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities during the employment process which are consistent with legal requirements. If you wish to request an accommodation while seeking employment, please call 888.692.2272 or email [e-mail]. We will make accommodation determinations on a request‑by‑request basis. Messages and emails regarding anything other than accommodations requests will not be returned

Affiliated Companies

Affiliated Companies: AmerisourceBergen Services Corporation