Lead - Security Governance and Assurance

About the Role
You will lead security governance and assurance with a focus on identity and access management. Your primary responsibilities will include owning the access model, policies, controls, and the evidence needed for auditors, regulators, and customers. You will serve as the hands-on identity design authority, guiding engineers and analysts, while managing identity tooling and vendor relationships in collaboration with Information Security, Platform Engineering, Application Support, Internal Audit, HR, and system owners.

Responsibilities
What You’ll Own

• Own the identity and access management strategy and roadmap, covering joiner-mover-leaver lifecycle, authentication, authorization, privileged access, and federation.
• Design and maintain the organization’s role-based access control (RBAC) model, including role definitions, entitlement structures, and segregation of duties, ensuring it adapts as the business evolves.
• Oversee access governance, including periodic access reviews and certification, entitlement recertification, and providing evidence that least privilege is applied in practice rather than just in policy.
• Set standards and patterns for privileged access management across infrastructure, applications, and endpoints, ensuring controlled, time-bound, and auditable elevation of privileges.
• Optimize existing privileged access tooling and provide evidence-based recommendations for improvements where controls are constrained.
• Define application integration standards with identity, such as SSO, SAML, OAuth, and OIDC, and review integrations against these standards prior to deployment.
• Automate identity lifecycle and access provisioning to minimize manual effort and related errors.
• Own the security governance framework for identity and access management, including policies, standards, and control definitions in line with ISO 27001, NIST CSF, and applicable UAE requirements.
• Lead assurance activities for control testing, internal and external audits, and customer security due diligence, ensuring findings are addressed and resolved.
• Provide security review and design authority for new systems, cloud workloads, and acquisitions, specifically focusing on identity and access management.
• Define and report on identity and access metrics, including privileged account inventory, standing administrator rights, orphaned accounts, review completion rates, provisioning performance, and exceptions.
• Mentor engineers and analysts to elevate the standard of identity practice across the broader technology function.
• Within six months, assess privileged, dormant, standing, and endpoint administrator access; prioritize and address significant risks; agree on the target RBAC model; and establish evidenced access reviews and integration standards.
• Within twelve months, implement RBAC and segregation of duties across priority systems; reduce standing privilege through time-bound, auditable access; automate identity lifecycle; resolve audit findings effectively; and utilize routine metrics and knowledge sharing to enhance identity capability.

Qualifications
What We’re Looking For

• Deep, hands-on expertise in enterprise identity and access management, including identity governance, administration, single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and privileged access management across infrastructure and endpoints.
• Experience in designing and implementing an RBAC model on an enterprise scale, including role engineering, entitlement design, and segregation of duties, ensuring operational functionality.
• Strong capabilities in Microsoft Entra ID, including Conditional Access, Privileged Identity Management, hybrid identity, and application registration.
• Practical experience with at least one enterprise IGA platform, such as SailPoint, Saviynt, or a comparable solution, including oversight of access certification campaigns and lifecycle automation.
• Proficiency in security governance and assurance, with experience writing policies and control standards aligned with ISO 27001 or NIST, and successfully navigating internal and external audits.
• Extensive knowledge of federation and modern authentication protocols, including SAML, OAuth 2.0, and OIDC, with the ability to critically assess application integrations.
• Experience acting as a technical design authority or senior technical lead, establishing standards for others to follow and defending these when challenged.
• Excellent communication skills to convey access risk clearly to engineers, auditors, and business stakeholders, with an ability to articulate the significance of controls beyond policy constraints.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with privileged and endpoint privilege management tooling, such as ManageEngine PAM360, Application Control Plus, and endpoint privilege controls. Knowledge of CyberArk, BeyondTrust, or Microsoft Intune EPM is also relevant.
• Skills in identity lifecycle automation and scripting, including PowerShell and systems integration with HR for identity sourcing.
• Experience with UAE regulatory requirements and operating in public sector or regulated customer environments.
• Knowledge of identity integration during mergers, acquisitions, or organizational restructuring.
• Understanding of cloud security posture and workload identity in Azure or AWS, including service principals, managed identities, and secrets management.
• Relevant certifications such as CISSP, CISM, Microsoft Identity and Access Administrator, or ISO 27001 lead auditor qualification.
• Experience in governing access to AI systems and data, including agent and service identity.

What Working Here Offers

• Culture: An open, diverse, and inclusive environment with a global vision that encourages personal growth and focuses on ground-breaking, industry-first innovations.
• Career: Opportunities for outstanding learning, development, and growth via structured training programs and engaging, high-tech projects.
• Rewards: A competitive remuneration package with various perks, including healthcare, education support, leave benefits, and more.

If you are a performance-driven, inquisitive individual with the ability to adapt to ambiguity and a passion for exploring collaborative opportunities to create unique customer-centric solutions, we would like to hear from you.