Director, Customer Identity and Access Management

About the Position

Nscale is hiring a Director of Identity to lead the engineering function accountable for authentication, authorization, 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 organizationally strong enough to align stakeholders and ship iteratively without compromising correctness.

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, organizational 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 authorization 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 deliverables.
• Bias for action. Ability to turn ambiguous goals into a practical, high-impact sequence of deliverables.

Preferred

• Experience building workload identity and service-to-service authentication at scale (mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE, token minting, short-lived credentials).
• Experience designing for agent identity: service accounts, delegated/impersonation flows, scoped credentials, and policy enforcement for autonomous systems.
• Experience with large-scale policy and permissions management, including UX for access requests, reviews, and auditable automated approval systems.
• Proven success shipping platforms or internal products adopted broadly by engineering teams.
• Experience with Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Pulumi), event-driven architectures, and message queues (NATS/Kafka/RabbitMQ).
• Comfort partnering closely with developer experience functions: documentation and tooling that drive adoption.
• Familiarity with GPU orchestration or ML platform concerns (identity boundaries across workload scheduling and multi-tenant environments).

We Offer

• Competitive salary range of $230,000 - $400,000 USD.
• Benefits package including medical, dental, vision, flexible paid time off, parental leave, and retirement plan participation.
• Equity, bonus, and/or commission programs may be available.

About the Company

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