Staff Privileged Access Engineer (PAM)

Nscale; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity

Performance reviews

Flexible workplace

Job summary

Nscale is seeking a Staff Security Engineer focused on Privileged Access (PAM) to design and operate privileged access workflows across enterprise systems, SaaS, and production environments. The role emphasizes automated, time-bound elevation with auditable trails and risk-based controls.

You will implement JIT access, break-glass readiness, and tiering for Tier 0/1 systems while driving telemetry, detection, and governance with cross-functional partners.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in identity security, privileged access, security engineering, or related roles.
• Hands-on experience designing or operating privileged access workflows (JIT, break-glass, access request/approval).
• Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, RBAC, SSO, MFA, and least privilege.
• Experience automating access workflows, entitlement cleanup, evidence collection, or revocation processes.
• Strong scripting, workflow automation, API integration, or platform engineering skills.
• Ability to translate access risk into practical controls adopted by engineering/ops.
• Experience across enterprise systems, production environments, SaaS, IT, infra, and compliance stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Build privileged access workflows across enterprise SaaS admin roles, production systems, cloud consoles, infrastructure management, source control, data platforms, endpoint admin, and emergency access paths.
• Design access patterns enabling request, approval, justification, time-bound elevation, and automated revocation.
• Define practical controls reducing reliance on permanent admin rights in high-risk environments.
• Establish clean audit trails for privileged access activity across critical systems.
• Implement JIT access with approval, justification, expiry, revocation, and evidence collection.
• Create a privileged access baseline defining who can approve access, required justification, duration, evidence, and revocation.
• Own exception governance for access paths not yet meeting standards.
• Drive entitlement cleanup and stale privilege reduction via automation.
• Design break-glass access standards, ownership models, monitoring, and recovery procedures.
• Test emergency access workflows and break-glass readiness.
• Develop tiering for Tier 0/1 systems, admin paths, and sensitive groups.
• Identify top 10 highest-risk standing privileges and remediation paths.
• Define privileged access telemetry for audit, investigations, and executive reporting.
• Partner with Security Data to establish detections and source-health requirements.
• Track metrics like standing privilege reduction, JIT adoption, and access review closure.
• Build an inventory of top admin paths, owners, approvers, access methods, logging, expiry, and risk.

Skills

Privileged Access

JIT Access

Break-glass

Automation

Scripting

Platform Eng

Audit Trails

Job description

Nscale is seeking a Staff Security Engineer focused on Privileged Access (PAM) to design and operate privileged access workflows across enterprise systems, SaaS, and production environments. The role emphasizes automated, time-bound elevation with auditable trails and risk-based controls.

You will implement JIT access, break-glass readiness, and tiering for Tier 0/1 systems while driving telemetry, detection, and governance with cross-functional partners.