Design SME - Next Gen

Design SME - IAM, NextGen
Sheffield (3 days per week onsite)
£550 per day
ASAP start | Initial contract until December 2026
Overview
We are seeking an experienced Design SME to support its next-generation Identity & Access Management (IAM) transformation programme. Working within the IDAM 2.0 workstream, you will provide technical leadership, architecture ownership and end-to-end solution design across a large-scale enterprise IAM estate.
The successful candidate will be responsible for translating business, security and regulatory requirements into secure, scalable and supportable identity solutions, while ensuring alignment to enterprise architecture standards and strategic objectives.
Key Responsibilities

• Produce High-Level Designs (HLDs) and Low-Level Designs (LLDs) for enterprise IAM capabilities.
• Define end-to-end technical solutions across business, application, data and infrastructure domains.
• Design and implement authentication, authorisation and identity federation architectures.
• Develop reference architectures, technical standards and reusable design patterns.
• Design cloud-native IAM solutions within GCP and Kubernetes environments.
• Define integration patterns between identity platforms, applications and infrastructure.
• Design Agent Identity, Human Identity and Workload Identity capabilities.
• Develop Zero Trust security architectures and trust boundary models.
• Design API security, service-to-service authentication and workload authentication frameworks.
• Create event-driven architectures using asynchronous messaging and processing models.
• Develop Policy-as-Code architectures using technologies such as OPA and Cedar.
• Define PKI, certificate life cycle management and secrets management solutions.
• Ensure solutions meet security, scalability, resilience and performance requirements.
• Produce Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and technical governance documentation.
• Support Architecture Review Boards and Design Authority governance activities.
• Conduct technical assurance reviews across internal and supplier-delivered solutions.
• Identify and manage technical risks, dependencies, assumptions and constraints.
• Partner with Enterprise Architects, Product Owners and Engineering teams throughout delivery.
• Provide technical leadership, mentoring and engineering best practice guidance.