Security Engineer / Architect Identity, Authorization & Platform Security

Location: Denver, CO 100% Onsite
Job Type: Contract
Duration: Contract / Long-Term Engagement

Position Overview

We are seeking a hands-on Security Engineer / Architect to design, build, and implement a unified, policy-driven security layer across the platform.

The primary focus will be on Identity & Access Management (IAM), RBAC, authorization, cloud security, secrets management, vulnerability management, security telemetry, SIEM integration, and platform security.

This is a builder's role, requiring strong hands-on engineering experience. The selected candidate will own the architecture, deliver reference implementations, establish security standards, and work closely with engineering teams to implement production-ready security solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Identity & Access Management / RBAC

• Design a canonical identity, entitlement, and role model across infrastructure, cloud IAM, applications, containers, and other downstream systems.
• Implement identity federation using OIDC, SAML, OAuth2, and standards-based provisioning.
• Build automated user/group/role provisioning and lifecycle management.
• Implement access recertification and governance processes.
• Design and implement Just-in-Time (JIT) and least-privilege access using short-lived credentials and on-demand elevation.
• Establish SSO and API authentication across services.
• Implement consistent organization and tenant isolation across identity and downstream platforms.

Authorization & Policy Engineering

• Design and implement centralized authorization using RBAC, ABAC, and/or ReBAC models.
• Implement an externalized policy-decision engine and manage policies as code.
• Define fine-grained authorization boundaries for users, applications, agents, services, and tools.
• Implement OAuth2/OIDC concepts including scopes, audiences, token exchange, JWTs, and audience restriction.
• Address authorization risks such as confused-deputy scenarios and inappropriate token passthrough.

AI Agent & Tool Security

• Design authorization models for AI agents and automated tool invocation.
• Establish agent workload identities and delegated authorization.
• Implement per-agent cryptographic identities and on-behalf-of authorization.
• Define tool-level permissions based on users, agents, tenants, resources, and actions.
• Implement human-in-the-loop approval workflows for sensitive operations.
• Maintain complete, tamper-evident audit trails for agent and tool activity.
• Apply security controls against prompt injection and unauthorized tool execution.

Secrets & Cloud Security

• Implement centralized secrets management and automated credential rotation.
• Design secure cloud IAM architectures and least-privilege access.
• Implement secure credential management for applications, workloads, agents, and infrastructure.
• Support secure execution environments and sandboxing for sensitive tool calls.

Vulnerability Management

• Implement continuous vulnerability scanning across:
  • Edge compute nodes
  • Containers and container images
  • Operating systems
  • Application dependencies
  • Container-orchestration platforms
  • Third-party libraries
  • Device firmware where applicable
• Implement SBOM generation, tracking, and vulnerability correlation.
• Correlate CVEs with asset exposure and exploitability.
• Develop risk-based vulnerability prioritization and remediation workflows.
• Build operational and executive vulnerability dashboards.
• Integrate vulnerability findings with event platforms and ticketing workflows.

Security Telemetry & SIEM

• Deploy security telemetry capabilities across edge environments.
• Capture authentication, authorization, process execution, network connections, file integrity, configuration changes, secret access, and agent/tool activity.
• Normalize security events into a common schema.
• Integrate security telemetry with centralized SIEM platforms.
• Implement store-and-forward capabilities for intermittently connected edge environments.
• Design bandwidth-aware event batching and reliable event delivery.
• Implement tamper-evident and mutually authenticated telemetry pipelines.
• Maintain tenant isolation throughout the telemetry pipeline.
• Develop SIEM detection and correlation rules that associate security events with verified identities.
• Route actionable security alerts into event buses and on-call workflows.

Platform Security Integration

• Establish security standards for event-platform authentication and authorization.
• Implement message signing and secure service-to-service communication.
• Support edge-device identity, mTLS, PKI, and certificate lifecycle management.
• Integrate security controls into CI/CD pipelines.
• Implement security gates including artifact signing, IaC scanning, and automated security validation.
• Partner with engineering teams to establish reusable security primitives and standards.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in security engineering.
• 3+ years of experience architecting and implementing Identity & Access Management at scale.
• Strong hands-on experience with enterprise Identity Providers and identity federation.
• Deep knowledge of OAuth2, OIDC, SAML, JWT, SSO, and standards-based provisioning.
• Experience mapping federated identities to downstream authorization models.
• Strong understanding of OAuth2/OIDC scopes, audiences, token exchange, and audience restrictions.
• Hands-on experience implementing RBAC and at least one of ABAC or ReBAC.
• Experience with externalized authorization/policy engines.
• Strong cloud IAM experience.
• Hands-on experience with centralized secrets management and automated credential rotation.
• Experience with containers and container orchestration.
• Ability to develop production-quality code and implement security solutions hands-on.
• Demonstrated experience implementing least-privilege and Just-in-Time access.
• Experience building fully auditable access-control systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience securing AI agents, LLM applications, and automated tool-invocation interfaces.
• Knowledge of prompt-injection and AI tool-boundary security.
• Experience with workload identity and machine-to-machine authentication.
• Experience building security telemetry pipelines and SIEM integrations.
• Experience with vulnerability-management programs, SBOM tools, CVE correlation, and risk prioritization.
• Experience securing edge, IoT, or intermittently connected environments.
• Experience with lightweight host-based security telemetry agents.
• Knowledge of Zero Trust architecture.
• Experience with PKI, mTLS, certificate lifecycle management, and device attestation.
• Experience with event-driven security architectures.
• Experience implementing secure CI/CD and automated security gates.
• Security architecture certifications are a plus but not required.