Senior Manager, Identity & Access Management – Global Operations

Identity & Access Management (IAM) is seeking a strategic operations leader to serve as Senior Manager, IAM Global Operations, responsible for shaping how IAM services are delivered at global scale across the Vanguard workforce. This role focuses on redefining IAM operations—moving from reactive, ticket driven execution to an automated, resilient, intelligence driven global operating model that strengthens security, compliance, and business enablement.

Reporting to the Global Head of IAM Operations, this leader will own the end to end IAM operational ecosystem driving consistency, reliability, and continuous improvement. You will lead and develop high performing global teams, partner closely with engineering, cybersecurity, and business stakeholders, and help define the future of IAM operations  ideal candidate is a strategic, outcome oriented leader who thrives in complex, highly regulated environments and brings a strong engineering and operational mindset to scaling automation and reducing friction.

This role carries a dual mandate: ensuring IAM operations run smoothly, reliably, and compliantly day to day, while evolving the operating model for the future. Success looks like IAM operations where automation is the default, manual work is the exception, and services are predictable, measurable, and trusted at enterprise scale—delivering a simplified, reliable experience for our Vanguard workforce.

• Define and execute the global IAM operations strategy and target operating model, aligned to Zero Trust principles and Vanguard’s enterprise risk posture.
• Transform IAM operations from manual and reactive to automated, predictive, and scalable, with clear SLAs, KPIs, and operational health metrics.
• Build and lead a globally distributed operations organization, fostering accountability, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Serve as a visible IAM operations leader in executive, risk, and governance forums—articulating outcomes, risks, and operational maturity.

• Drive aggressive automation across IAM operational processes, including access provisioning, de‑provisioning, lifecycle events, certifications, and exception handling.
• Reduce operational friction and cycle times by eliminating toil, standardizing workflows, and integrating IAM into upstream and downstream technology platforms.
• Partner with IAM engineering teams to ensure operability is designed in, not bolted on—shifting left on reliability, monitoring, and remediation.
• Champion Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and ITSM best practices within IAM operations.

• Oversee incident, problem, change, and service management processes for IAM platforms and services ensuring high availability and resilience in partnership with engineering.
• Lead root cause analysis for operational issues and ensure systemic fixes—not workarounds.
• Drive consistency across regional teams while respecting local regulatory, audit, and business requirements.

• Partner closely with cybersecurity, cloud, infrastructure, application, and business teams to embed IAM seamlessly into enterprise workflows.
• Collaborate with compliance, audit, and risk partners to ensure IAM operations meet regulatory and control expectations.
• Act as a key liaison between IAM strategy, engineering, and operations, ensuring execution matches intent.

• Experience operating IAM services at enterprise scale, including:
  • Identity lifecycle management
  • Access provisioning and certifications
  • Directory services and authentication platforms
  • Privileged and non‑privileged access operations
• Understanding control frameworks, operational risk, and audit readiness.

• Proven success driving automation led‑ operational transformation in complex environments.
• Familiarity with Dev Ops/SRE concepts, infrastructure as code, and API d‑riven operations.

• Demonstrated success leading multiregional‑teams, with strong coaching and talent development skills.
• Ability to communicate complex…