Engineering Manager, Identity & Access Management

About the role

This role involves leading the Identity and Access Management team, shaping how identity, authentication, authorization, and key-management services are developed and scaled across Lambda Cloud. You will manage a team responsible for core identity and authorization services crucial for all Lambda products, including APIs, Console, Kubernetes, and other cloud services. This is a leadership position with a strong technical focus, requiring engagement in architecture, strategy, and design decisions for highly available, low-latency, and resilient services.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Build, lead, and expand the IAM engineering team, hiring engineers and developing technical leaders while fostering high engineering standards.
• Collaborate with IAM technical leaders to define and implement the long-term technical and architectural strategy for Lambda's IAM platform.
• Develop secure, scalable identity capabilities for individuals, services, and workloads, covering federation, SSO, and service identity.
• Advance the authorization platform, including RBAC, policy evaluation, and resource hierarchy, prioritizing least privilege and auditability.
• Ensure easy adoption of IAM across all Lambda services through consistent APIs, resource and action models, and integration standards.
• Establish and manage Lambda's Key Management Service, including customer-managed keys, HSM protection, key lifecycle controls, and integration across compute, storage, and networking.
• Oversee the reliability, security, performance, and operations of critical IAM services, including observability, safe rollouts, incident response, and disaster recovery.
• Translate enterprise requirements into lasting platform capabilities and clearly communicate strategy, delivery, risk, and operational health to leadership.
• Balance the complexity and flexibility needed for enterprise-grade IAM with simple, intuitive experiences for customers with varying levels of identity and access expertise.

Requirements

• 9+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 3+ years leading and developing engineering teams in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems with high availability, security, and reliability requirements.
• Strong technical judgment in cloud infrastructure and IAM, covering authentication, authorization, workload identity, privileged access, and policy enforcement.
• Ability to engage deeply in architecture, critically evaluate designs, and guide tradeoffs across security, correctness, scale, performance, and operability.
• Proven track record of building high-performing teams and developing engineers and technical leaders during periods of growth and change.
• Experience driving cross-functional platform or security initiatives and influencing teams and leaders without direct authority.
• Capability to transform ambiguous infrastructure problems into clear strategy, pragmatic execution, and widely adopted platform capabilities.
• Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders, setting a high bar for engineering quality, operational discipline, and ownership.
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with public-cloud or multi-tenant IAM, authorization/policy engines, or security token services.
• Experience with KMS, HSMs, customer-managed keys, secrets management, or encryption platforms.
• Experience supporting enterprise or regulated customers, or building foundational platforms in a high-growth environment.
• Experience supporting compliance programs such as SOC 2 or translating compliance requirements into platform capabilities.

Skills & tools

• Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Authentication
• Authorization
• Key Management Service (KMS)
• HSMs
• SSO
• SCIM
• RBAC
• Distributed Systems
• Cloud Infrastructure
• Kubernetes

Practical notes

This position requires presence in the San Francisco or San Jose office 4 days per week; Tuesday is currently the designated work-from-home day. Lambda offers generous cash and equity compensation, health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents, wellness and commuter stipends for select roles, a 401k Plan with a 2% company match (USA employees), and a flexible paid time off plan.

About the company

• Founded in 2012, with 500+ employees, and growing fast
• Our investors notably include TWG Global, US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA, Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, Wiwynn, Gradient Ventures, Mercato Partners, SVB, 1517, and Crescent Cove
• We have research papers accepted at top machine learning and graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG
• Our val