Engineering Manager, Identity & Access

About the Company Our client is a global fintech and digital asset infrastructure company providing payments technology and blockchain-based financial products to businesses and developers worldwide. About the Role Our client is building customer identity and access infrastructure for its platform and product teams. The team owns sign-up and sign-in, API credentials, enterprise SSO and federation, orgs, workspaces, roles and entitlements, authorisation and policy capabilities, and emerging non-human and agent identity. The role provides frontline technical leadership while staying close enough to the systems to materially raise engineering quality through architecture decisions, code review, debugging, incident response, migrations, and prototypes when needed. The team expects direct communication and a flat operating style. Key Responsibilities ● Own the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for identity and access capabilities. ● Manage, coach, and grow a team of engineers while setting a high engineering-quality bar. ● Lead technical designs, review critical code paths, help debug difficult production issues, and participate in incident response. ● Guide major migrations, cutovers, rollback planning, and architectural change. ● Partner with Security, Product, Risk, Onboarding, and the engineering teams that integrate with identity. ● Turn competing requests into a clear sequence of work and explain tradeoffs directly. ● Improve operational readiness, reliability, developer experience, and engineering practices across the platform. What You Will Bring ● 3+ years directly managing software engineers, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing senior engineers (around 2 years considered where technical depth is exceptional). ● Production experience building or technically leading authentication, authorisation, identity, access-control, or adjacent security-sensitive platform capabilities. ● Recent architecture or design ownership, with continued proximity to code, design reviews, production debugging, and incidents. ● Proactive security judgment around access, privilege, authentication, authorisation, and blast-radius risk. ● Experience operating systems with real users, multi-team dependencies, reliability requirements, and meaningful security consequences. ● Working knowledge of OAuth 2.x, OpenID Connect, SAML, federation, enterprise SSO, session and token design, RBAC or ABAC, and fine-grained authorisation. ● AI-forward engineering judgment, using AI within a disciplined workflow while independently validating correctness. Backgrounds We Would Love to Hear From ● Identity product or platform EMs from identity providers or customer-identity companies. ● High-scale product identity EMs who owned customer identity, account security, federation, or access control at major tech, fintech, or cloud companies. ● Security platform EMs who built service or workload identity, credential, policy, zero-trust, or authorisation systems. ● Backend or platform EMs who personally led a major auth migration or identity platform build. ● Leaders from regulated environments (fintech, payments, crypto) with real ownership of entitlements, auditability, and sensitive actions. Nice to Have ● Multi-tenant authorisation services used by multiple product teams, including migration from legacy permission models. ● Agent, workload, or non-human identity: short-lived credentials, delegated authority, scoped authority, audit chains, SPIFFE or SPIRE, MCP authorisation. ● MFA, passkeys, and account protection flows. ● Policy engines such as OPA or Cedar, or zero-trust architectures. ● Sound build-vs-buy judgment between hosted identity providers and product-specific authz layers.