Sr Identity Architect

Sr Identity Architect

Strategic Staffing Solutions is currently looking for a Sr Identity Architect for a W2 contract opportunity!

Location:

Detroit, MI - Hybrid schedule (In office Tue, Wed, Thu) Duration: 12+ month contract with eligibility for renewal. Role Type: W2 contract

Required Skills:

10+ years of experience in Cybersecurity, Information Security, or Enterprise Architecture, with at least 5 years dedicated specifically to enterprise-scale IAM architecture and design. Proven track record of leading identity transformation programs within highly regulated industries (e.g., utilities, financial services, aerospace, or critical infrastructure). Extensive experience designing, visualizing, and implementing IAM solutions across hybrid environments, including multi-tier infrastructures and major public cloud domains.

Company Overview:
As a leading Fortune 500 public utility company, we provide safe, reliable, and essential energy and infrastructure services to millions of customers. Operating in a highly regulated and rapidly evolving landscape, we are launching a multi-year technology modernization initiative. Utility infrastructure requires applying security best practices and operational consistency across both corporate IT and operational technology (OT) environments, while maintaining the necessary isolation to protect critical infrastructure.

We are seeking a visionary Principal Identity Architect to serve as the chief designer and strategist for our enterprise identity ecosystem.

Position Summary:

The Principal Identity Architect is a senior-level, hybrid leadership role operating as a high-influence individual contributor. This position is responsible for defining the long-term vision, strategy, and target architecture for our enterprise Identity and Access Management (IAM) program. This position will serve as a hands-on technical authority who blends macro-level strategy with actionable, engineering blueprints. The successful candidate will lead the unification of a highly diverse technical landscape that has grown organically through various business cycles.

Your mission will be to visually interpret this distributed environment, map it against our long-term corporate and technical strategies, and build an executable 5-year modernization roadmap. Importantly, this role demands immediate impact: you will prioritize the concurrent mitigation of areas yielding the highest risk and greatest short-term benefit while simultaneously shaping the long-term, foundational strategy. You will act as the authoritative voice on how identities are governed, authenticated, and authorized, ensuring our technical architecture complies with stringent federal and state utility regulations.

Key Responsibilities:

Tactical Execution & Architecture Unification:
Conduct an immediate, visually driven inventory of the distributed identity landscape across all corporate IT, cloud, and operational technology (OT) systems. Translate abstract security concepts into clear, high-utility technical diagrams, end-to-end process workflows, and architectural visualizations that effectively communicate the current and future state to both executive leadership and technical engineers. Identify areas yielding the highest risk and greatest short-term benefit within the current environment during your first 90 days and engineer practical, tactical remediations to be fully executed while the broader strategy takes root.

Establish authoritative enterprise identity standards incorporated into all aspects of the organization, ensuring implementations follow technical baselines. Establish clear transformation milestones and operational metrics to track the migration from legacy infrastructure to modern, consolidated identity ecosystems, ensuring the business sees measurable progress at every phase.

Regulatory Compliance & Governance Engineering:
Architect practical identity solutions that natively satisfy the compliance mandates of a publicly traded utility, including Public Service Commission (PSC) regulations, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS), North American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP) standards, and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) security directives. Partner directly with Compliance, Control Owners, and Technical teams to design access controls and automated evidence-generation workflows that achieve successful, repeatable audit outcomes across multiple frameworks and general IT controls simultaneously.

Develop identity architectures and unified operational patterns that satisfy multiple overlapping regulatory mandates, eliminating redundant, compliance-specific system silos. Implement structured Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) frameworks, focusing on rigorous role-based access control (RBAC), automated joiner-mover-leaver workflows, and separation of duties (SoD) to reinforce general IT controls.

Security Framework & Cloud…