Senior Identity Access Specialist

We're Hiring: Senior Identity Access Specialist

Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience Level: Senior

Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a globally focused organization committed to protecting digital identities, applications, infrastructure, data, and business operations across diverse markets. Our teams collaborate across Cybersecurity, IT, Infrastructure, Applications, Cloud, Human Resources, Risk, Compliance, and external technology partners to maintain secure and efficient access to organizational resources.

We focus on modern identity and access-management practices that strengthen security, simplify user access, enforce least privilege, improve governance, and provide reliable identity services across cloud, hybrid, and enterprise environments.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Identity Access Specialist to lead identity and access-management operations, access governance, authentication, authorization, privileged access, identity lifecycle management, and continuous improvement of enterprise identity services.

The ideal candidate will combine strong IAM expertise with practical knowledge of directory services, single sign-on, federation, privileged access management, access reviews, identity governance, cloud identity, and security controls. The role will work closely with Security, IT, HR, Application, Infrastructure, and business teams to ensure users receive appropriate access while maintaining strong security and compliance standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and implement identity and access-management strategies aligned with organizational security objectives.
• Manage enterprise identity lifecycle processes from onboarding through role changes, transfers, and offboarding.
• Establish and maintain identity provisioning, modification, suspension, and deprovisioning processes.
• Ensure user access is granted according to approved roles, responsibilities, and business requirements.
• Implement and maintain role-based access control and least-privilege principles.
• Develop and maintain identity governance standards, procedures, workflows, and operating controls.
• Manage user identities across on-premises, cloud, hybrid, and SaaS environments.
• Administer and optimize directory services and enterprise identity platforms.
• Manage Microsoft Entra ID, Active Directory, or equivalent identity platforms where applicable.
• Configure and maintain single sign-on solutions across enterprise applications.
• Implement and manage SAML, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, LDAP, and other identity protocols.
• Manage identity federation between internal systems, cloud platforms, SaaS applications, and external partners.
• Configure and maintain multi-factor authentication and adaptive authentication policies.
• Support passwordless authentication, conditional access, device-based authentication, and risk-based access controls where applicable.
• Develop authentication policies that balance security, usability, and business requirements.
• Manage privileged accounts and administrative access across infrastructure, applications, databases, cloud platforms, and critical systems.
• Work with Privileged Access Management solutions to control, monitor, rotate, and audit privileged credentials.
• Establish just-in-time and just-enough-access controls where appropriate.
• Monitor privileged-account activity and investigate inappropriate or anomalous administrative access.
• Conduct periodic access reviews and certification campaigns for applications, systems, privileged accounts, and sensitive resources.
• Coordinate access certification activities with business owners, managers, system owners, and application administrators.
• Identify excessive, outdated, duplicate, orphaned, or inappropriate access.
• Ensure access is removed promptly when users leave the organization or no longer require access.
• Maintain accurate identity records, account inventories, role assignments, entitlement catalogs, and access histories.
• Develop and maintain role and entitlement models for critical applications.
• Support segregation-of-duties requirements and identify potentially conflicting access combinations.
• Work with Risk and Compliance teams to address identity-related control requirements.
• Support internal and external audits involving identity, access, authentication, and privileged accounts.
• Maintain evidence for access reviews, provisioning, deprovisioning, privileged access, authentication controls, and security exceptions.
• Investigate access-related security incidents, authentication anomalies, unauthorized access, and policy violations.
• Support incident-response teams during account compromise, credential theft, privilege escalation, and identity-related incidents.
• Analyze identity logs and authentication events to identify suspicious access behavior.
• Develop identity-security monitoring and alerting requirements.
• Implement controls for dormant, inactive, service, shared, generic, and non-human accounts.
• Establish governance for service accounts, application identities, machine identities, API credentials, and other non-human identities.
• Coordinate certificate, secret, token, and credential lifecycle management with relevant technical teams.
• Support cloud identity and access controls across infrastructure, applications, data platforms, and development environments.
• Ensure identity policies are appropriately integrated with cloud security and zero-trust architectures.
• Support identity integration with HR systems, IT service-management platforms, applications, directories, and security tools.
• Automate identity provisioning and access-management workflows using APIs, orchestration, scripts, or workflow platforms.
• Reduce manual access-management activities through automation and standardized approval processes.
• Develop and maintain IAM integrations with enterprise applications and SaaS platforms.
• Support identity-platform upgrades, migrations, implementations, and technology transformations.
• Participate in IAM architecture reviews and provide recommendations for identity platforms, integrations, and security controls.
• Define technical requirements for new applications requiring authentication, authorization, federation, or automated provisioning.
• Validate identity controls during application onboarding and technology changes.
• Manage IAM-related incidents, service requests, access exceptions, and escalations.

Key Performance Indicators

• Identity platform availability
• User provisioning turnaround time
• User deprovisioning completion time
• Access-request processing time
• Access-request SLA compliance
• Automated provisioning rate
• Automated deprovisioning rate
• Provisioning success rate
• Provisioning failure rate
• Identity synchronization accuracy
• Access certification completion rate
• Access-review exception rate
• Excessive-access remediation rate
• Orphaned-account remediation rate
• Dormant-account remediation rate
• Privileged-account review completion
• Privileged-access policy compliance
• Privileged credential rotation compliance
• Just-in-time access adoption
• Least-privilege compliance
• Role-based access coverage
• Segregation-of-duties compliance
• MFA adoption rate
• Passwordless authentication adoption
• Authentication success rate
• Authentication failure rate
• SSO adoption rate
• Identity federation availability
• Conditional-access policy compliance
• Unauthorized access incidents
• Identity-related security incidents
• Account-compromise detection rate
• Identity incident response time
• Access exception resolution time
• Service-account governance coverage
• Non-human identity inventory accuracy
• Service-account review completion
• Access-policy compliance
• Audit finding rate
• IAM control remediation rate
• IAM change success rate
• Identity integration delivery performance
• Application onboarding time
• IAM automation coverage
• Identity data quality
• Identity-platform synchronization performance
• Stakeholder satisfaction
• IAM documentation completeness
• Security and compliance assessment performance

Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate should have strong experience in identity and access management, IAM operations, identity governance, privileged access management, authentication, directory services, or cybersecurity, preferably within a complex enterprise, multinational, financial, technology, or highly regulated environment.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Strong understanding of identity and access-management principles and security practices.
• Proven experience managing enterprise IAM environments.
• Strong knowledge of identity lifecycle management and joiner, mover, and leaver processes.
• Experience implementing role-based access control and least-privilege models.
• Strong knowledge of Microsoft Entra ID, Active Directory, LDAP, or equivalent directory technologies.
• Experience with single sign-on and identity federation.
• Strong knowledge of SAML, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, LDAP, and related identity protocols.
• Experience implementing and managing multi-factor authentication.
• Knowledge of conditional access, adaptive authentication, and risk-based access controls.
• Strong experience with privileged access management and administrative-account security.
• Experience conducting access reviews, entitlement reviews, and access certifications.
• Strong understanding of segregation-of-duties and access-governance principles.
• Experience managing service accounts, application identities, machine identities, and other non-human identities.