Lead CIAM Operations Engineer

You could be the one who changes everything for our 28 million members by using technology to improve health outcomes around the world.  As a diversified, national organization, Centene's technology professionals have access to competitive benefits including a fresh perspective on workplace flexibility.
 

Position Purpose:

We are seeking a highly skilled Lead Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) Engineer to oversee the operations, reliability, and support of our Customer IAM platform. This role focuses on day-to-day operations, observability, incident response, and continuous improvement to ensure secure, seamless, and resilient identity experiences for our customers.

As a technical leader, this role will guide the team in building operational maturity, responding to incidents effectively, and ensuring our CIAM services meet enterprise-grade reliability, compliance, and customer experience standards.

Operations & Support:

• Lead daily operations of the customer IAM environment (authentication, SSO, MFA, passwordless, risk engines, authorization, directories, APIs).
• Own the support process, from L2/L3 troubleshooting through post-incident reviews.
• Establish and enforce SLAs, escalation paths, and runbooks for IAM service reliability.
• Act as a subject-matter expert for Ping Identity, OIDC/OAuth2, SAML, SCIM, and related CIAM technologies.

Observability & Reliability:

• Implement end-to-end observability: logging, metrics, traces, and alerting for IAM services and integrations.
• Partner with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Security Operations teams to improve monitoring, dashboards, and health checks.
• Drive resiliency engineering: chaos testing, failover simulations, and operational readiness reviews.

Incident Response:

• Serve as the incident commander for CIAM-related outages and security events.
• Lead root cause analysis (RCA), remediation, and knowledge capture for continuous improvement.
• Ensure effective communication to customers, stakeholders, and executives during incidents.
• Maintain 24x7 on-call readiness rotation playbooks and post-mortem culture

Leadership & Strategy:

• Mentor and guide IAM engineers on operational excellence and incident handling.
• Partner with product teams to embed operational requirements into design and delivery of new IAM capabilities.
• Ensure IAM services meet regulatory, compliance, and audit requirements (NIST, ISO, OWASP, SOC2, HIPAA).
• Advocate for automation, self-service tooling, and reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR).
• Performs other duties as assigned.
• Complies with all policies and standards.

Education/Experience: A Bachelor's degree in a quantitative or business field (e.g., statistics, mathematics, engineering, computer science) and requires 5 – 7 years of related experience.

Or equivalent experience acquired through accomplishments of applicable knowledge, duties, scope and skill reflective of the level of this position.

Technical Skills:

• 5+ years of experience in Identity and Access Management, with at least 3 years in a senior/lead or principal role.
• Deep expertise with IAM protocols and platforms (OIDC, OAuth2, SAML, SCIM, Ping Identity suite, Okta, ForgeRock, Azure AD, or similar).
• Strong background in operations, observability, and incident management.
• Experience with monitoring and logging platforms (Splunk, Datadog, ELK, Prometheus/Grafana).
• Hands-on with automation and scripting (Python, Node.js, PowerShell, Terraform, CI/CD).
• Proven track record in incident response leadership, RCA, and executive communication.
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks (NIST, OWASP, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI).

Soft Skills:

• Intermediate - Seeks to acquire knowledge in area of specialty
• Intermediate - Ability to identify basic problems and procedural irregularities, collect data, establish facts, and draw valid conclusions
• Intermediate - Ability to work independently
• Intermediate - Demonstrated analytical skills
• Intermediate - Demonstrated project management skills
• Intermediate - Demonstrates a high level of accuracy, even under pressure
• Intermediate - Demonstrates excellent judgment and decision making skills
• Intermediate - Ability to communicate and make recommendations to upper management
• Intermediate - Ability to drive multiple projects to successful completion
• Intermediate - Possesses technical aptitude

License/Certification:

• Certified Identity and Access Manager (CIAM) preferred
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