Director, Customer Identity and Access Management (AI)

Location: New York, United States

Salary: $230,000–$400,000 USD annually, plus potential bonus, equity, and/or commission.

Company

Nscale builds a cloud platform requiring secure, reliable identity services across APIs, consoles, SDKs, and CLI workflows.

What you will do

• Lead the engineering function responsible for authentication, authorization, and identity propagation for humans, agents, and workloads.
• Define the multi-year Identity strategy, organizational design, delivery model, budget, and headcount plan.
• Build and develop engineering teams and managers while establishing a scalable leadership structure.
• Set platform-wide standards for federation, policy enforcement, workload identity, shared libraries, SDKs, middleware, and documentation.
• Own reliability, performance, rollout safety, incident response, observability, auditability, and evidence generation for critical-path identity systems.
• Partner with Product, Platform, Infrastructure, SRE, and Security to align architecture, roadmaps, metrics, and sovereignty controls.

Requirements

• Staff+ or Principal-level engineering background, or equivalent, with strong expertise in distributed systems and security boundaries.
• Experience hiring, leading, and developing engineering teams with strong delivery and operational standards.
• Deep experience with authentication and authorization systems, including OAuth 2.0/OIDC, RBAC/ABAC, token exchange, JWT/JWKS, and policy engines such as OPA or Cedar.
• Hands-on experience designing, building, and operating scalable production systems on AWS, GCP, or Azure, including day-two operations.
• Experience managing high-blast-radius systems through incremental delivery, rollback planning, correctness guarantees, and rapid recovery.
• Ability to work with Security, Product, and Engineering leadership, turn ambiguous goals into deliverables, and communicate measurable outcomes.

Nice to have

• Experience with workload identity, service-to-service authentication, mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE, token minting, and short-lived credentials.
• Experience designing agent identity, delegated or impersonation flows, scoped credentials, and policy enforcement for autonomous systems.
• Experience with large-scale permissions management, access reviews, auditable approvals, and broadly adopted internal platforms.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform or Pulumi, event-driven architectures, and NATS, Kafka, or RabbitMQ.
• Familiarity with developer experience tooling, GPU orchestration, or ML platform identity boundaries.

Culture & Benefits

• Player-coach role combining deep technical architecture work with organizational leadership.
• High ownership across Product, Platform, Infrastructure, SRE, and Security.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Flexible paid time off, parental leave, and retirement plan participation.
• Potential bonus, equity, and/or commission programs in addition to base salary.