Senior Director - Cybersecurity Identity & Access Management

Lead enterprise identity strategy as a core cybersecurity executive driving a unified Identity & Access Management vision. This onsite role in Richmond, VA reports to the CISO and combines executive ownership with hands-on architectural and operational excellence across SSO, MFA, governance, PAM, CIAM, and identity threat detection.

The Senior Director partners with technology, application, risk, and compliance leaders to embed zero-trust controls, strengthen regulatory alignment, and improve identity risk reporting and remediation outcomes. You will also guide multi-year transformation through automation and advanced analytics to increase scalability, reliability, and measurable security performance.

Responsibilities

• Establish, own, and execute the overarching Identity & Access Management vision, multi-year strategy, roadmap, and operating model, including hiring and managing the IAM organization
• Implement and oversee core IAM capabilities: SSO, MFA, credential vaulting, identity governance, privileged access management, secrets management, lifecycle management, access certifications, identity-related threat detection, third-party governance, and CIAM
• Design identity solutions for complex or non-standard deployment scenarios where standard IAM services cannot be directly applied
• Own identity management governance by defining and meeting performance metrics, partnering with business teams to remediate non-compliance issues
• Develop cyber security metrics and executive reporting processes, including KPIs and measurement routines
• Partner with technology and application teams to onboard applications to enterprise-approved identity products and services during enterprise cloud migration
• Coordinate with risk management and compliance stakeholders to maintain full regulatory alignment
• Set non-human identity (NHI) governance and secrets management controls, including machine identity lifecycle management, service account rotation, and API credential security across multi-cloud environments
• Partner with Threat Detection and Response leadership to implement identity threat detection and response (ITDR) for continuous monitoring, detection, and remediation of anomalous access behaviors and credential misuse
• Drive cross-functional access governance across business, HR, and technology teams to enforce least privilege, RBAC, and automated joiner-mover-leaver workflows
• Architect resilient cloud and federated identity models across multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures, standardizing SSO, MFA, and zero-trust conditional access policies (Azure/Entra ID, GCP, Okta)
• Lead M&A identity integration and divestiture strategies, including identity carve-outs, directory consolidations, and federation separation
• Architect and deliver enterprise-grade identity products and services designed for scalability, fault tolerance, and high availability
• Use automation, AI, and ML to improve operational efficiency, automate lifecycle governance and user provisioning, and enhance proactive identity threat detection

Requirements

• Degree or equivalent experience. Typically requires 15+ years of professional experience and 10+ years of diversified leadership, planning, communication, organization, and people motivation skills (or equivalent experience)
• 15+ years of cybersecurity experience with significant depth in identity and access management, engineering and architecture, risk management, and compliance, including 10+ years leading teams and/or enterprise programs
• Hands-on and leadership experience building and managing an IAM program
• Proven ability to drive remediation at scale: establish SLAs, clarify ownership, prioritize backlogs, and close systemic gaps identified via incidents, hunts, and assessments
• Executive-ready communication and stakeholder management to present risk, progress, and investment needs to senior leadership and influence decisions
• Ability to set strategy, secure organizational alignment/approvals, and deliver outcomes across multiple stakeholders including Security, Infrastructure, Cloud, Application/Product, and business teams
• Strong risk communication skills, including translating detection gaps and remediation tradeoffs into business impact and driving decisions to closure
• Experience establishing oversight metrics and operational rhythms (OKRs/KPIs, reporting, service reviews) to improve alert quality, reduce noise, and accelerate remediation throughput
• Working knowledge of relevant governance and regulatory expectations, with the ability to partner with audit/compliance and privacy stakeholders while operating effective detection and response capabilities
• Track record of building high-performing teams and leading with integrity, accountability, and operational discipline
• Experience developing multi-year roadmaps and influencing investment decisions related to people, tooling, telemetry, and automation
• Experience managing vendor relationships and security tooling or managed services, including defining requirements and measuring performance against outcomes
• Strong understanding of privacy considerations and monitoring practices; ability to partner with Legal/Privacy and HR while staying within policy and regulatory boundaries
• Experience in hybrid/cloud environments and partnering with platform teams to instrument systems for reliable detections (cloud logging, identity signals, endpoint telemetry, network data)
• Strong strategic and tactical decision-making to balance speed and risk, define compensating controls, and drive complex remediation decisions across multiple owners
• Experience leading or sponsoring purple team activities, tabletop exercises, and control validation to improve detection coverage and response playbooks
• Trusted leadership style that builds credibility with executives and teams through transparency, follow-through, and operational excellence

Education

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information security/assurance, engineering, or a related field; advanced degree preferred or equivalent experience

Certifications

• Relevant certifications (preferred): CISSP, CISM, GIAC/SANS, +, SSCP, or equivalent foundational security certification
• TDR/SecOps certifications (a plus): Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer and/or Associate Cloud Engineer, Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, and/or GIAC certifications (for example, GSEC, GCIH), or cloud/security engineering certifications aligned to team platforms

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, and Vision
• Health Spending Accounts
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• 401(k) (U.S.)
• Pension (Canada)
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Mental Health Programs
• Flexible Schedules
• Paid Time Off
• Wellness Program
• Education Reimbursement
• Volunteer Opportunities
• Flexible Work Environment