Principal Security Architect, Identity Resilience

AvePoint•New York, NY

4d•$180,000 - $270,000

About The Position

The Principal Architect for Identity Security serves as the senior technical authority for the security architecture of AvePoint’s identity resilience initiatives. The role focuses on securing, trusting, containing, recovering, and validating enterprise identity providers, identity control planes, privileged access systems, application identities, and hybrid identity environments before, during, and after a disaster or identity compromise. Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID are central platforms, though the scope is not limited to a single provider. This role is distinct from a platform-specific backup and recovery architect. It owns the threat model, control-plane security, recovery trust model, incident-response integration points, secure restore guardrails, and post-recovery validation requirements needed to ensure identity resilience platforms can be trusted in adversarial conditions. The architect translates hands-on identity security expertise into product architecture, security requirements, and customer-facing recovery guidance, and works with CISOs, identity architects, incident responders, platform engineers, product leaders, and other teams. This is not a generic IAM governance or pure SOC analyst role. The successful candidate understands identity as Tier-0 infrastructure, attacker persistence across identity systems, and how to design product workflows that help customers prepare, recover, and validate a trusted known-good state after a serious incident. The role also includes customer and field discovery, market and competitor tracking, and mentoring internal engineering and product teams.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Cybersecurity, or a related technical field; equivalent practical experience is strongly considered.
12+ years of hands-on technical experience in identity infrastructure, cybersecurity architecture, incident response, or security engineering, with deep specialization in enterprise identity security.
Direct experience securing or recovering complex identity environments, including Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, hybrid identity, federation, trust relationships, privileged access boundaries, application and workload identities, and ransomware or destructive-attack readiness.
Deep understanding of Active Directory security internals, including Kerberos, NTLM, LDAP, ACLs/delegation, privileged groups, admin tiering, DCSync/replication rights, krbtgt rotation, golden/silver ticket risk, domain/forest trusts, SID history, SPNs, constrained/unconstrained/resource-based constrained delegation, SYSVOL/GPO security, DNS, and AD CS/PKI risk.
Deep understanding of Entra ID security architecture, including Conditional Access, PIM, privileged roles, administrative units, authentication methods, Identity Protection, app registrations, enterprise applications, service principals, OAuth consent, workload identities, cross-tenant access, federation, and token/session behavior.
Strong understanding of hybrid identity security, including Entra Connect, Cloud Sync, password hash sync, pass-through authentication, AD FS/federation, sourceAnchor/ImmutableID, hard/soft match, source-of-authority conflicts, and the impact of on-premises compromise on Microsoft 365/Entra environments.
Hands-on experience with identity incident response and recovery workflows, including compromised-user containment, refresh-token/session revocation concepts, application/service-principal compromise response, API consent review, credential rotation, Conditional Access emergency response, and persistence removal.
Experience designing security architecture for high-privilege tools or platforms that operate against Tier-0 infrastructure, including secure credential handling, least privilege, separation of duties, audit logging, tamper resistance, approval workflows, and customer-managed key/storage models.
Familiarity with disaster recovery and business continuity requirements for identity systems, including RTO/RPO tradeoffs, known-good baselines, clean recovery environments, in-place versus clean-tenant recovery decisions, and post-restore validation.
Ability to translate complex security requirements into product requirements, architecture patterns, workflow guardrails, customer-facing warnings, and engineering-implementable acceptance criteria.
Strong customer-facing credibility with CISOs, identity architects, AD engineers, SOC/IR teams, compliance leaders, and executive stakeholders.
Demonstrated ability to lead without authority across Product, Engineering, Security, Architecture, Customer Success, Sales Engineering, and partner teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience working at or with vendors building AD/Entra backup, recovery, ITDR, identity protection, or hybrid identity resilience products, such as Semperis, Quest, Cayosoft, Microsoft, Rubrik, Commvault, Veeam, CrowdStrike Identity, Mandiant, or equivalent.
Experience with Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk, CrowdStrike, Semperis DSP, Quest, Cayosoft Guardian, or similar identity detection/response ecosystems.
Relevant certifications or recognition such as Microsoft Certified: Cybersecurity Architect Expert, Identity and Access Administrator, CISSP, GIAC, Microsoft MVP, or equivalent hands-on expertise.

Responsibilities

Own security architecture for AvePoint’s identity resilience platforms, including threat modeling, recovery trust criteria, privileged-access safeguards, secure restore guardrails, and post-recovery validation workflows.
Partner with backup and recovery architects to ensure identity restore, relationship recovery, policy recovery, and source-of-authority workflows operate safely under breach conditions.
Define the product’s Tier-0 security model, including least privilege, just-in-time elevation, credential isolation, gMSA usage, privileged access workstation expectations, break-glass handling, secure service accounts, immutable audit trails, and separation of monitoring and restore permissions.
Design security requirements for the backup control plane, including administrator roles, service app and consented permissions, BYOS storage controls, network restrictions, key management, deletion approvals, retention tamper resistance, and recovery-data integrity validation.
Define pre-breach recovery readiness support, including known-good state documentation, critical identity object inventory, break-glass validation guidance, restore permission validation, and out-of-band communications readiness.
Architect secure workflows for identity breach recovery, from trusted control, detection and triage support, and containment handoffs through persistence review, trust decisions, known-good restore, downstream workload recovery, and validation.
Translate identity attack and persistence patterns into product requirements, including malicious application registrations, service-principal credential abuse, illicit consent grants, access-policy tampering, privileged role changes, risky federation or trust changes, guest-user persistence, and group membership abuse.
Define containment handoff requirements and product guidance for token/session revocation, password reset sequencing, service-principal credential rotation, app disablement, admin-consent review, and emergency Conditional Access controls.
Design safe Conditional Access recovery patterns, including dependency validation, break-glass protection, policy state handling, restore-as-disabled/report-only options where supported, and approval checkpoints before re-enabling high-impact policies.
Design application recovery security requirements, including generated app secrets, new key IDs, API permission re-consent, Enterprise Application permission caveats, SSO/provisioning validation, credential rotation workflows, and secure reporting of secrets or remediation tasks.
Define how the product compares current state with known-good backups without overstating detection, including post-recovery-point objects, privileged assignment changes, app credential changes, modified Conditional Access policies and Named Locations, and membership changes.
Own the post-restore security validation model, including critical object, privileged access, app/service-principal, Conditional Access dependency, and break-glass validation; manual remediation checklists; and security, audit, and compliance evidence/reporting.
Provide specialized recovery security guidance for Active Directory, including forest/domain trust risk, domain controller trust boundaries, krbtgt and privileged credential handling, AD CS and certificate abuse, SYSVOL/GPO integrity, DNS trust assumptions, and safe forest recovery sequencing.
Partner with Product, Engineering, Architecture, Security, and Field teams to turn security and recovery requirements into epics, design reviews, acceptance criteria, test plans, and customer-facing recovery guidance.
Conduct customer and field discovery with CISOs, incident responders, AD architects, Entra ID administrators, identity security teams, MSPs, and regulated/government customers to validate real-world scenarios.
Track competitor and market patterns across identity resilience and related vendors, emphasizing security and recovery workflows rather than generic feature comparisons.
Mentor engineering and product teams on AD/Entra security concepts, identity attack paths, recovery safety principles, and security-first workflows for Tier-0 infrastructure.