Senior Privileged Identity Specialist

🏗 We're Hiring: Senior Privileged Identity Specialist

📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time

💼 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior

🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a construction-focused organization committed to delivering complex projects through disciplined contract management, operational excellence, effective risk management, and collaborative project delivery. Our distributed teams work across Project Management, Construction, Engineering, Procurement, Commercial, Legal, Finance, Human Resources, Design, Quality, HSE, Consultants, Contractors, Suppliers, Logistics, Administration, Information Technology, and Executive Leadership to protect business-critical systems, secure sensitive information, and maintain reliable technology operations.

We recognize that privileged identities represent some of the most sensitive access pathways within an organization. By implementing strong identity controls, enforcing least-privilege principles, and maintaining effective governance over elevated accounts, we aim to reduce cybersecurity risks, protect project and commercial information, and support secure business operations across our enterprise.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Privileged Identity Specialist to manage and strengthen privileged identity security across enterprise IT infrastructure, cloud environments, business applications, and critical operational systems.

The successful candidate will oversee the lifecycle of privileged identities, including discovery, onboarding, identity verification, access provisioning, authentication controls, entitlement management, periodic reviews, monitoring, and deprovisioning. The role will focus on reducing excessive privileges, securing administrative and non-human identities, improving privileged access governance, and ensuring that elevated access is granted only to authorized individuals and approved system processes.

Working closely with Identity and Access Management (IAM), Privileged Access Management (PAM), Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, Cloud Engineering, Application Support, Human Resources, Compliance, Risk Management, and Internal Audit teams, the Senior Privileged Identity Specialist will help implement robust identity controls, support security investigations, maintain audit-ready documentation, and improve the organization's overall privileged identity security posture.

Key Responsibilities1. Privileged Identity Lifecycle Management

• Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of privileged identities across enterprise systems, applications, infrastructure, and cloud platforms.
• Identify, register, classify, and maintain inventories of privileged users, administrative accounts, service identities, emergency accounts, and other elevated identities.
• Establish consistent processes for privileged identity creation, approval, provisioning, modification, suspension, and removal.
• Validate privileged identity ownership, business justification, system scope, assigned responsibilities, and authorization requirements.
• Ensure that privileged identities are associated with accountable individuals, system owners, or approved technical processes.
• Coordinate privileged identity changes following employee onboarding, transfers, promotions, role changes, contract extensions, and departures.
• Work with Human Resources and line managers to ensure that changes in employment status trigger appropriate privileged access adjustments.
• Identify dormant, orphaned, duplicate, unmanaged, and unauthorized privileged identities and coordinate remediation.
• Review privileged identities periodically to confirm that they remain necessary, appropriately assigned, and aligned with current operational requirements.
• Ensure that temporary privileged identities have defined expiration dates and are removed when their approved purpose ends.
• Maintain accurate records of privileged identity ownership, authorization, status, entitlements, and associated systems.
• Support identity lifecycle processes across employees, contractors, consultants, third-party support personnel, and other authorized users.

2. Privileged Access Management Integration

• Administer and support privileged identity controls integrated with approved PAM and identity governance platforms.
• Coordinate the onboarding of privileged identities into centralized privileged access management solutions.
• Support the discovery and reconciliation of privileged accounts across servers, databases, network devices, endpoints, applications, and cloud services.
• Validate that privileged identities are correctly associated with their corresponding managed accounts, systems, and access policies.
• Support the configuration of password vaulting, credential rotation, privileged session management, and controlled credential retrieval.
• Coordinate integration between PAM platforms, directory services, identity governance solutions, ticketing systems, and enterprise applications.
• Troubleshoot privileged identity synchronization issues, account discovery failures, ownership discrepancies, and provisioning errors.
• Ensure that privileged identities are managed through approved security platforms wherever required by organizational policy.
• Support the implementation of just-in-time privileged access and time-bound elevation where supported by the environment.
• Work with technical teams to improve automation for privileged account discovery, onboarding, approval, and deprovisioning.
• Maintain documentation covering privileged identity integrations, workflows, dependencies, and administrative procedures.

3. Privileged Identity Governance

• Develop, implement, and maintain privileged identity governance policies, standards, procedures, and operational controls.
• Define requirements for privileged identity ownership, approval, authorization, review frequency, and access expiration.
• Ensure that privileged identities are assigned only the permissions required to perform approved duties.
• Apply least-privilege, need-to-know, role-based access control, and segregation-of-duties principles.
• Establish clear accountability for privileged identities across infrastructure, application, database, network, cloud, and security environments.
• Coordinate periodic privileged identity certification and entitlement reviews with business managers and system owners.
• Validate that elevated access remains justified by current job responsibilities and operational requirements.
• Identify conflicts between privileged roles and recommend corrective measures.
• Review exceptions to privileged identity policies and ensure that deviations are appropriately justified, authorized, documented, and time-bound.
• Support identity governance initiatives to improve visibility into privileged access across the organization.
• Collaborate with IAM and Cybersecurity leadership to align privileged identity controls with enterprise security objectives.
• Recommend improvements to privileged identity governance based on audit findings, risk assessments, incidents, and changes in the technology environment.

4. Administrative Account Security

• Manage and secure privileged identities used for operating systems, infrastructure administration, application management, database operations, and network configuration.
• Review administrative account assignments across Windows, Linux, Unix, virtualization platforms, and enterprise infrastructure.
• Support the management of domain administrator, local administrator, root, database administrator, network administrator, and equivalent high-privilege identities.
• Identify excessive administrative permissions and recommend appropriate role restrictions or privilege reductions.
• Ensure that shared administrative accounts are minimized and that exceptions are documented and controlled.
• Support the separation of standard user identities from privileged administrative identities.
• Validate that administrative accounts use approved authentication mechanisms and security configurations.
• Coordinate the removal of unnecessary local administrator rights and unauthorized elevated permissions.
• Review administrative access associated with critical infrastructure and systems supporting project delivery.
• Support secure administration practices for engineering platforms, document management systems, enterprise resource planning applications, and commercial systems.
• Ensure that privileged identity changes follow approved change management and authorization procedures.
• Coordinate with system owners to validate the continued need for specialized administrative identities.

5. Privileged Authentication and Credential Security

• Support strong authentication requirements for privileged identities across enterprise systems and administrative interfaces.
• Implement and maintain multi-factor authentication controls for privileged users wherever technically supported and required.
• Coordinate the use of approved credential vaulting, rotation, and secure retrieval mechanisms.
• Support password policy enforcement, authentication policy configuration, session timeout requirements, and credential protection standards.
• Identify privileged identities using weak, shared, static, exposed, or otherwise inadequately protected credentials.
• Coordinate remediation of compromised credentials and potentially exposed privileged authentication secrets.
• Support certificate-based authentication, managed identities, hardware-backed authentication, and other approved authentication methods where applicable.
• Ensure that privileged credentials are not unnecessarily embedded in scripts, configuration files, source code, deployment pipelines, or documentation.
• Work with application and automation teams to migrate exposed credentials to approved secret management solutions.
• Support secure recovery and emergency access procedures for critical administrative identities.
• Review authentication failures, unusual login patterns, and other events that may indicate misuse of privileged identities.