Principal Cloud Iam Engineer

Workday Workday · Enterprise · USA.VA.Reston

Principal Identity and Access Management Architect to own the strategy, design, and long-term direction of Workday's IAM program, focusing on securing AI agents in production and AI-driven workloads. This is a strategic, architectural role, not operational, shaping patterns for other engineers and influencing leadership. The scope includes human and non-human identity, cloud authorization, federation, secrets management, and the emerging challenge of securing AI agents in production.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the strategy, design, and long-term direction of our IAM program.
  2. Set the patterns other engineers build against, make the architectural calls that shape how we scale, and work directly with engineering, security, and Risk leadership to drive alignment across the organization.
  3. The scope spans human and non-human identity, cloud authorization, federation, secrets management, and the emerging challenge of securing AI agents in production — where the patterns don't fully exist yet and you'll be helping to define them.
  4. Lead without always having direct authority, mentor engineers who are earlier in their IAM journey, and bring a risk-informed perspective that translates threat exposure into pragmatic architectural decisions — not checkbox compliance.
  5. Get ahead of problems before they scale, builds with the next three years in mind, and can hold a technical vision across a complex enterprise environment.

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years of experience in cloud security or IAM, with at least 3 years in a senior or architect-level role with clear ownership of strategy and technical direction.
  • Proven AWS IAM foundations SCPs, IAM Identity Center, ABAC, multi-account Organizations architecture, and secrets management at scale via AWS Secrets Manager or equivalent vault solutions.
  • Demonstrated Okta experience at enterprise scale SSO, adaptive MFA, SCIM provisioning, lifecycle management, and AWS environment integration.
  • Deep familiarity with federation protocols SAML, OIDC, and OAuth2 applied and debugged across complex, heterogeneous environments.
  • Infrastructure-as-code fluency with Terraform, and a clear understanding of how identity controls integrate into and are enforced through CI/CD pipelines.
  • Hands-on engagement with AI and agentic identity is required. This means working knowledge of NHI lifecycle management, service-to-service trust models, and least-privilege design for workloads that assume IAM roles, call external APIs, and chain actions across services.

Nice to have

  • GCP familiarity is advantageous but not required.
  • Familiarity with AI security tooling such as identity-aware proxies, agent observability platforms, or LLM access governance is a strong differentiator.

What the JD emphasized

  • Hands-on engagement with AI and agentic identity is required.
  • you'll be helping to define them

Other signals

  • securing AI agents in production
  • emerging challenge of securing AI agents
  • AI-driven workloads
  • identity is no longer a support function; it's a core security boundary and an enabler of how we build and ship products