Sr. Principal IAM Security Engineer

Job Requisition ID #

Position Overview

Autodesk’s Cyber Defense team is looking for a Sr. Principal IAM Security Engineer to lead the strategy and execution for modern Identity and Access Management across human and non-human identities, including service accounts, workloads, secrets-backed identities, federated identities, and emerging AI/agentic identity patterns. You’ll design and drive scalable, secure-by-default identity guardrails for workforce and platform/product environments, enabling engineering teams to move fast while reducing systemic identity risk. 

You’ll lead key initiatives such as Zero Trust enforcement, Non-Human Identity (NHI) governance, IAM Threat Management and automation of identity workflows, while working across multiple business units to align platforms, reduce risk, and build seamless access experiences. 

 

Key Responsibilities 

 Identity Strategy & Governance  

• Define the enterprise and platform IAM strategy for human identities, NHI, and AI/agent identities, including lifecycle, authentication, authorization, and auditing standards

• Establish identity reference architectures, patterns, and paved roads for product teams and internal engineering

Non-human Identity Security (Enterprise + Platform) 

• Build and operationalize controls for service identities, workload identities, API identities, bots, and automation accounts across cloud, CI/CD, and runtime environments

• Drive adoption of short-lived, federated credentials where feasible; reduce static secrets and unmanaged service accounts

• Implement lifecycle governance for NHI: creation standards, ownership, rotation/attestation, inactivity reaping, and incident response playbooks

AI / Agentic Identity Enablement 

• Define secure patterns for AI acting on behalf of users or services, including delegated authorization, scoped tokens, and least-privilege access models

• Partner with AI platform teams to implement guardrails: identity provenance, policy enforcement, auditing, and kill-switch mechanisms for misbehaving agents

• Ensure AI identity behaviors are measurable and governable (logging, traceability, approvals for sensitive actions, segmentation of duties)

Authorization, Policy, and Access modeling 

• Build/standardize authorization models (RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC as appropriate) across workforce and product systems

• Drive consistent policy as code, access reviews, and privileged access workflows

• Define standards for token scopes, claims, session constraints, step-up auth, and sensitive action protections

Operational Excellence & Incident Readiness 

• Improve detection/response for identity threats: anomalous token use, privilege escalation, credential misuse, service-account sprawl. 

• Create metrics and reporting for identity posture and platform adoption (coverage, drift, exceptions, time-to-remediate)

• Lead identity-related investigations and post-incident improvements

Leadership & influence 

• Serve as a senior technical leader influencing engineering orgs, platform teams, and security; mentor others and raise the bar on identity engineering

• Translate risk into pragmatic engineering requirements; drive roadmaps across multiple teams

Minimum Qualifications 

• 10+ years in IAM / security engineering, including designing identity architectures at enterprise scale

• Proven exper