Senior CIAM Architect: Identity Platform Strategy Lead

Citizens Financial; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Citizens Financial seeks a Principal CIAM Architect to design and drive the Customer Identity and Authentication program. You will define target state architecture, standards, and integration patterns across authentication, federation, and identity services, partnering with multiple teams to translate strategy into scalable solutions.

This hybrid role emphasizes architecture leadership over hands-on coding, guiding engineering teams, validating security controls, and ensuring high availability

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing enterprise Identity and Access Management or Customer Identity and Access Management architectures.
• Strong direct experience with customer facing identity and authentication platforms at enterprise scale.
• Architecture experience with major CIAM technologies such as Ping Identity, ForgeRock, Okta, Auth0, Microsoft Entra External ID or similar.
• Experience architecting Passwordless Authentication, Passkeys, MFA, Adaptive or Risk Based Authentication capabilities.
• Experience designing identity solutions for web, mobile and API based applications.
• Experience integrating identity with fraud signals, device intelligence or behavioral analytics.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the target state architecture for Citizens' CIAM ecosystem.
• Establish enterprise patterns and standards for authentication, federation, and identity lifecycle services.
• Develop architecture for modern authentication capabilities (Passkeys, Passwordless, MFA, Adaptive Authentication).
• Provide architectural leadership across CIAM platforms (Ping Identity, ForgeRock, Okta, Auth0, Entra ID).
• Define integration patterns for APIs, mobile experiences and customer facing services.
• Lead architecture decisions on identity orchestration, authentication journeys, session management and customer authorization.
• Ensure CIAM architecture meets availability, resilience, scalability, performance and security requirements.

Skills

Enterprise Architecture

Security Architecture

CIAM Strategy

OAuth 2.0/OIDC

Identity Federation

Passwordless Authentication

Tools

Ping Identity

ForgeRock

Okta

Auth0

Microsoft Entra ID

Job description

Citizens Financial seeks a Principal CIAM Architect to design and drive the Customer Identity and Authentication program. You will define target state architecture, standards, and integration patterns across authentication, federation, and identity services, partnering with multiple teams to translate strategy into scalable solutions.

This hybrid role emphasizes architecture leadership over hands-on coding, guiding engineering teams, validating security controls, and ensuring high availability