Director, Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Danaher•Sunnyvale, CA

18h•Onsite

About The Position

The Director, Identity and Access Management (IAM) is responsible for defining, governing, and evolving the enterprise-wide technology architecture to enable business strategy, scalability, security, and regulatory compliance. Shifting from traditional tactical operations to proactive strategic oversight, this role will architect a future-proof identity fabric across Human Identities, Machine/Non-Human Identities, Shared Accounts, and Privileged Accounts. The Director acts as a strategic advisor to business and IT leaders, serves as an innovation catalyst driving change across corporate boundaries, and leads a centralized governance function to improve Cepheid's IAM maturity. This position reports to the I&O Leader and is part of the I&O group located in Sunnyvale / Santa Clara.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent experience.
10+ years of experience in enterprise, business, solution, platform, or security identity architecture.
Ability to balance the long-term architectural design with short-term operational baselines and organizational goals.
Ability to influence without authority and communicate complex technical trade-offs effectively with executive, business, and cross-functional technical stakeholders.
Understanding of existing, new, and emerging identity paradigms, such as generative AI applications, automated agent orchestration, and graph identity data modeling.
Ability to travel 10% of the time globally

Nice To Haves

Designing secure systems with privacy and compliance in mind within heavily regulated environments (such as life sciences, FDA, or biotechnology spaces).
Hands-on familiarity with deep identity protocol integration logic (OIDC, SAML, OAuth, SCIM).

Responsibilities

Develop the overarching IAM charter, strategy, and investment roadmaps, transforming the team into a proactive business-enablement partner that aligns identity controls with business value.
Orchestrate the modernization and continuous rationalization of the identity technology portfolio, evaluating and improving capability zones across Human Identities, Machine/Non-Human Identities, Shared Accounts, and Privileged Access Management (PAM).
Partner proactively with cross-functional platform teams, DevOps, cybersecurity, HR, and compliance to design scalable, decentralized identity patterns that integrate directly into continuous deployment pipelines.
Partner with stakeholders across Operating company boundaries to shape technology demand and actively drive modern identity standards and best practices at the broader Danaher level.
Assess emerging AI trends to safely integrate agentic automation into workflows, shifting routine execution to autonomous systems while maintaining critical human technical oversight and ethical decision boundaries.
Shape technology demand, evaluate build-versus-buy infrastructure decisions, and proactively lead advanced resilience testing—including simulating identity system failures and directory outages (Chaos Engineering)—to safeguard a highly regulated, distributed ecosystem.