Senior Director - Engineering Operations

Senior Director, IAM Engineering & Operations

UKG is seeking a Senior Director of Identity & Access Management (IAM) to lead and evolve our identity security strategy across enterprise and customer-facing platforms. This role is critical in ensuring secure, seamless, and scalable identity experiences for employees, customers, and partners across UKG's SaaS ecosystem.

You will oversee IAM, PAM, PKI, Active Directory (AD), and SSO/federation services, while driving a modern, cloud-first identity architecture aligned with Zero Trust principles. This leader will bring strong engineering depth, enabling identity as a platform, and a proven ability to build and scale high-performing global teams.

• Lead a global IAM Engineering & Operations organization.
• Drive operational excellence, platform reliability, and service maturity.
• Lead identity governance across both human and non-human (machine) identities.
• Partner with audit, risk, and compliance organizations to support regulatory and governance initiatives.
• Build and develop high-performing engineering leaders and teams.
• Define and execute a cloud-first IAM strategy supporting UKG's SaaS products and internal enterprise systems
• Partner with Product Engineering, Security, and Platform teams to embed identity into the software development lifecycle
• Champion identity as a core platform capability, enabling secure and frictionless user experiences
• Align IAM initiatives with customer trust, compliance, and uptime expectations in a SaaS environment
• Build, scale, and lead global IAM engineering, platform, and operations teams
• Foster a product and platform mindset within IAM (API-first, reusable services, developer enablement)
• Drive a culture of automation, reliability engineering (SRE principles), and continuous delivery
• Develop leadership bench strength and succession pipelines

• Lead development of scalable IAM services, APIs, and identity orchestration workflows
• Oversee integrations with customer-facing applications, SaaS platforms, and internal systems
• Enable CIAM (Customer Identity & Access Management) capabilities where applicable
• Promote Dev Sec Ops  practices, infrastructure-as-code, and automation in identity provisioning and governance

• Implement scalable identity lifecycle management and access governance across a distributed workforce
• Mature RBAC/ABAC models and access certification processes
• Ensure alignment with SOC 1, SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and other relevant compliance standards

• Lead PAM strategy to secure privileged access across cloud and production environments
• Implement just-in-time (JIT) access, session monitoring, and credential vaulting
• Reduce attack surface and enforce least privilege at scale

• Oversee PKI and certificate lifecycle management supporting secure communications and services
• Enable machine identity management and certificate-based authentication across cloud workloads
• Support encryption and key management strategies aligned with SaaS security requirements

• Lead modernization of Active Directory (hybrid) and Azure AD / Entra
• Drive transition toward cloud-native identity and directory services
• Ensure high availability, resilience, and security of identity infrastructure

• Embed IAM within UKG's Zero Trust architecture
• Proactively identify and mitigate identity-based threats and vulnerabilities
• Support audits, incident response, and continuous compliance efforts

Required Qualifications

• Experience leading IAM organizations within highly regulated industries (financial services experience preferred)
• Experience supporting regulatory audits, compliance programs, and governance initiatives
• Experience managing both IAM engineering and IAM operations functions
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or related field
• 12+ years of experience in IAM, security, or platform engineering, with 5+ years in senior leadership roles
• Strong software engineering background (Java, Python, .NET, or similar) with hands-on IAM solution development
• Proven success building and scaling global engineering teams in a SaaS or product organization
• Deep expertise in: IAM platforms (SailPoint, Saviynt, Okta, Ping, etc.), PAM solutions (Cyber Ark, Beyond Trust, etc.), Active Directory & Azure AD / Entra , SSO & federation protocols (SAML, OAuth, OIDC), PKI and machine identity management
• Experience supporting high-scale, highly available SaaS environments

• Industry certifications (CISSP, CISM, etc.)
• Experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred) and microservices architecture
• Familiarity with SRE practices, observability, and reliability engineering

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