AVP IAM & Governance

HealthEquity•Remote,

4d•Remote

About The Position

The AVP, Identity & Access Management, is the enterprise authority on identity, serving as the architect, evangelist, and operational owner of an identity-first security model. This role is crucial for establishing an identity-first security model where identity acts as the control plane for a cloud-first, zero trust enterprise. The leader will define and execute a multi-year B2E IAM strategy encompassing identity governance and administration (IGA), privileged access management (PAM), customer and workforce access management, non-human/machine identity, and identity threat detection and response (ITDR). Accountability extends to the engineering rigor, control effectiveness, and audit posture of the entire identity fabric. This position is ideal for a practitioner-leader and recognized thought leader with experience designing and operating identity programs at scale, fluency in modern identity standards and protocols, and the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to various stakeholders, including executives and auditors. The role also involves actively shaping the direction of the identity discipline through industry engagement and leadership.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or a related discipline, or equivalent work experience.
12–15+ years of progressive information security experience, with at least 5 years leading IAM teams and programs at enterprise scale.
Demonstrated track record of architecting and delivering at least one major identity transformation end to end (e.g., IGA platform implementation, workforce IdP migration, PAM program build-out, or zero trust identity modernization).
Deep, hands-on-credible expertise across the identity domain: IGA, access management, PAM, CIEM, ITDR, directory services, and non-human identity.
Fluency in identity standards and protocols — OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML 2.0, SCIM, LDAP/Kerberos, FIDO2/WebAuthn — and the architectural trade-offs among them.
Enterprise experience with leading IAM platforms (e.g., SailPoint, Saviynt, Okta, Microsoft Entra, Ping Identity, CyberArk, Delinea or comparable) and with integrating identity into SIEM/SOAR ecosystems.
Working knowledge of zero trust architecture (NIST SP 800-207), NIST SP 800-63 digital identity guidelines, and least-privilege design in cloud environments (AWS IAM, Azure RBAC/Entra).
Strong command of identity-relevant regulatory and assurance frameworks — HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2, SOX ITGCs — and experience defending control design to auditors.
Evidence of thought leadership: published writing, conference talks, standards or working-group participation, patents, open-source contribution, or recognized community leadership in the identity space.
Executive-caliber communication — able to translate deep technical architecture into board-level risk narratives — paired with strong leadership, mentorship, and team-building skills.

Nice To Haves

Master's degree preferred.
Relevant industry certifications strongly preferred — e.g., CISSP, CISM, CISA, CIDPRO, or vendor-specific identity certifications (SailPoint, Okta, Microsoft, CyberArk).

Responsibilities

Own and evangelize a multi-year AI led identity strategy and reference architecture that treats identity as the primary security perimeter, aligned to zero trust principles (NIST SP 800-207) and enterprise business objectives.
Serve as the organization's most senior voice on identity: publish internal position papers and architectural decision records, brief executive leadership and the Board on identity risk, and represent the company externally through industry forums, standards bodies, conference speaking, and peer communities.
Anticipate and translate emerging shifts — decentralized identity, verifiable credentials, passwordless/phishing-resistant authentication, AI-agent and workload identity, continuous access evaluation (CAEP/Shared Signals) — into pragmatic roadmap decisions with clear build/buy/retire rationale.
Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing team of IAM architects, engineers, and analysts; establish engineering career paths, on-call/operational maturity, and a culture of automation-first identity operations.
Operate identity as a product: define OKRs and SLOs for identity services (provisioning latency, certification completion, authentication availability, orphaned-account rates), and manage a prioritized backlog with IT, HR, Legal, Compliance, and business-line stakeholders.
Architect and operate the full identity lifecycle — joiner/mover/leaver (JML) automation driven by authoritative HR sources, birthright provisioning, SCIM-based downstream integration, and deprovisioning SLAs measured in minutes to hours.
Design and mature the enterprise access model using Agentic AI capabilities: role engineering and role mining, RBAC evolving toward attribute- and policy-based access control (ABAC/PBAC), segregation-of-duties (SoD) rulesets, and risk-based, evidence-quality access certifications that eliminate rubber-stamping.
Own governance of entitlement sprawl across SaaS, IaaS, and on-prem estates, including cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) and least-privilege enforcement in AWS/Azure environments.
Set the enterprise standard for authentication: phishing-resistant MFA (FIDO2/WebAuthn), passwordless adoption, adaptive/risk-based authentication, and session management policies calibrated to data sensitivity.
Own federation and SSO architecture (SAML 2.0, OIDC/OAuth 2.0), token security and lifetime strategy, and conditional access policy design across the enterprise application portfolio.
Govern directory and identity-store architecture — Entra ID and Active Directory hardening (tiered administration, attack-path reduction), hybrid identity synchronization, and rationalization of legacy identity repositories.
Advance externalized, policy-as-code authorization patterns (e.g., OPA/Rego, Cedar) for fine-grained, auditable access decisions in modern applications.
Own the privileged access management program: credential vaulting, session isolation and recording, just-in-time/zero-standing-privilege elevation, and break-glass governance.
Establish lifecycle governance for non-human identities — service accounts, API keys, certificates, workload identities, and emerging AI-agent identities — including inventory, ownership attestation, secrets management, and automated rotation.
Lead evaluation, selection, and engineering of the IAM technology stack — IGA, access management/IdP, PAM, CIEM, and ITDR platforms — with a bias toward API-first integration, infrastructure-as-code deployment, and CI/CD-managed identity configuration.
Ensure availability, resilience, and disaster recovery of identity services as tier-zero infrastructure; identity outages are business outages.
Instrument the identity fabric end to end: stream identity telemetry to SIEM, define detections for identity-centric attack techniques (credential stuffing, token theft, MFA fatigue, golden ticket/SAML forging, privilege escalation), and partner with the SOC on ITDR playbooks.
Own identity-related control design and operating effectiveness for HIPAA Security Rule safeguards, HITRUST CSF, SOC 1/SOC 2, SOX ITGCs, and applicable state privacy regimes; serve as primary identity interface for internal audit, external auditors, and regulators.
Run a continuous identity risk program: access-risk scoring, toxic-combination detection, periodic attack-path and privilege-escalation reviews, and identity-specific tabletop exercises.
Develop and maintain incident response plans for identity compromise scenarios and lead identity workstreams during security incidents.