Director- Identity and Access Management Architect

Job Title: Director- Identity and Access Management Architect

GCL: F

Introduction to role:

Are you ready to architect the identity backbone that powers life-changing science at global scale? This role puts you at the center of how our people, partners, and platforms securely connect, enabling faster, safer progress from discovery to delivery.

You will define the enterprise vision for identity and access and lead the practical shift from today’s landscape to a resilient, modern target state. By aligning technology decisions to business outcomes, you will simplify how we work, reduce risk, and improve the developer and user experience across a sophisticated global environment.

You will combine deep technical expertise with strong communication and empathy to bring together engineers, architects, and business leaders. Can you see yourself shaping standards that hundreds of teams rely on while guiding the tradeoffs that keep us moving at pace?

Accountabilities:

• Define and evolve the enterprise identity target state to enable secure, friction-right access across users, systems, applications, and data.
• Sequence the practical path from current-state to future-state, balancing risk, speed, and value to deliver measurable improvements in security and usability.
• Produce and maintain reference architectures, design patterns, standards, and architecture decision records; embed them across delivery teams and partner organizations to drive consistency.
• Act as a change agent who unites internal IAM engineers and external senior engineers, business technology engineering leads and architects, and enterprise architects around shared patterns and priorities.
• Lead and support design reviews for major initiatives; resolve cross-team technical disagreements; ensure identity choices scale and integrate across platforms and products.
• Ensure identity decisions account for security, usability, resilience, adaptability, and operational burden, with clear non-functional requirements and metrics.
• Define and supervise measures of success so improvements are transparent, supportable, and balanced, reducing toil while strengthening risk posture.

Essential Skills/Experience:

• Shape and maintain the enterprise identity target-state architecture and guide the practical transition from current-state to future-state, ensuring solutions are secure, supportable, and measurable.
• Produce and govern architecture artifacts such as reference architectures, design patterns, standards, and architecture decision records, and use them to drive consistency across engineering teams and partner organizations.
• Act as a change agent across a federated delivery model: working with internal IAM engineers while also demonstrating external senior engineers, business technology engineering leads and architects, and enterprise architects to align on patterns, sequencing, and delivery tradeoffs.
• Lead and/or support design reviews for major initiatives, resolve cross-team technical disagreements, and ensure identity decisions account for security, usability, resilience, auditability, and operational burden.

Desirable Skills/Experience:

• Deep expertise with modern identity protocols and standards such as OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, FIDO, and WebAuthn.
• Hands-on knowledge of cloud identity platforms and ecosystems (e.g., Microsoft Entra ID/Azure AD, AWS IAM, GCP IAM) and hybrid identity patterns.
• Experience with identity governance and administration, privileged access management, and secrets management (e.g., SailPoint, CyberArk, HashiCorp Vault).
• Consistent record implementing Zero Trust architectures, conditional access, MFA, device trust, and just-in-time access.
• Strong understanding of audit, compliance, and regulatory requirements in large, complex, and global environments.
• Ability to translate sophisticated identity concepts into clear guidance for engineering teams, with well-defined non-functional requirements and SLOs.
• Experience with automation and infrastructure-as-code for identity (e.g., Terraform, CI/CD) and integration with enterprise logging and SIEM.
• Architecture frameworks or certifications that support structured decision-making (e.g., TOGAF, SABSA), and experience facilitating architecture decision records.
• Background in resolving cross-domain design tradeoffs spanning security, networking, data, and application platforms.

When we put unexpected teams in the same room, we unleash bold thinking with the power to inspire life-changing medicines. In-person working gives us the platform we need to connect, work at pace and challenge perceptions. That's why we work, on average, a minimum of three days per week from the office. But that doesn't mean we're not flexible. We balance the expectation of being in the office while respecting individual flexibility. Join us in our unique and ambitious world.

Why AstraZeneca:

Here, your architecture decisions will directly protect breakthrough science and the people delivering it, while accelerating how we bring medicines to patients. You will work with modern technology and diverse experts brought together to fuel bold ideas, with the support to test, learn, and scale what works. We value kindness alongside ambition, pairing clear standards with real autonomy so you can connect trends to business goals and see your impact ripple across the enterprise.

If you are ready to build the identity foundation for a global mission and turn complex challenges into lasting, enterprise-wide results, this is your moment!

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity.  We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills.  We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.  We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics.  We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.