Sr Identity & Access Management Engineer (IAM)

At Early Warning, we’ve powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting-edge solutions like Zelle®, Paze®, and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses.

Early Warning follows a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship.

Overall Purpose

The Senior IAM Engineer sits within the Identity Platform Operations team, part of the broader Identity and Access Management department, and serves as the technical anchor for Early Warning's Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platform. This role leads the discovery, design, delivery, and operational health of Saviynt Enterprise Identity Cloud (EIC) and the governance controls that determine how identities are provisioned, certified, and constrained across a regulated financial technology environment.

This is a hands on, deeply specialized position rather than a generalist infrastructure role. The engineer is accountable for architecting access models, hardening segregation of duties controls, maintaining accurate technical documentation of supported systems, participating in audit and compliance activities, and serving as a subject matter expert in identity and access management. The role also carries a mandate to prototype new solutions to identity challenges, optimize existing systems, and evaluate emerging technologies as they become available.

Essential Functions

Platform Ownership and Engineering

• Owns the architecture, configuration, and operations of the Saviynt EIC platform, including access request, certification, and lifecycle management modules.
• Provides operational excellence for the identity governance platform including version maintenance, vulnerability management, patching, and overall platform health.
• Proactively monitors and maintains identity platform security assurances such as threat detection, user behavior analytics, and privileged user monitoring.
• Builds and manages connectors and integrations across directories, cloud platforms, databases, and enterprise applications, including Active Directory, Entra ID, Okta, ServiceNow, Workday, SAP, cloud infrastructure, and custom REST based endpoints.
• Authors PowerShell, Python, and other scripts to automate repetitive tasks and extend platform capability.

Governance, Controls, and Risk

• Designs and maintains identity governance controls including access certification and attestation campaigns, segregation of duties (SoD) rulesets, role based and attribute based access models (RBAC and ABAC), and least privilege enforcement.
• Automates the full identity lifecycle covering joiner, mover, and leaver events, including provisioning, deprovisioning, and access reconciliation, minimizing manual intervention and standing access.
• Ensures just in time and just enough access is enforced without hindering productivity or user experience.
• Develops and tunes workflows, rules, analytics, and reporting to detect access risk and drive remediation.
• Partners with internal audit, risk, and compliance to support control testing and evidence collection for regulatory frameworks relevant to financial services, including SOX, PCI DSS, GLBA, and related audit obligations.

Design, Delivery, and Quality

• Gathers requirements from business, security, and audit stakeholders, decomposes them into discrete technical components, and translates them into usable solutions incorporated into platform design.
• Establishes repeatable and reusable frameworks, patterns, and reference designs so that solutions scale consistently rather than being rebuilt for each use case.
• Plans and executes both manual and automated testing across configurations, integrations, and workflows, validating that solutions meet functional, security, and compliance requirements before release.
• Leads root cause analysis and resolution of complex identity issues spanning provisioning failures, entitlement drift, and integration breaks.
• Defines technical standards, patterns, and documentation that make the platform sustainable and repeatable as it scales.

Collaboration and Leadership

• Continuously evaluates the IAM organizational structure, system configuration, and application integrations, and provides recommendations for operational and security enhancements.
• Collaborates with Enterprise Architects, Security Architects, and Application Architects to drive adoption of IAM best practices and to support documentation standards.
• Develops relationships with business and technology stakeholders to ensure on time delivery.
• Actively participates in team stand up, technical engineering discussions, change control process, audit activities, business continuity efforts, and on call rotation.
• Mentors, coaches, and trains junior systems engineers, and models a strong sense of responsibility, ownership, and pride in delivering quality results.
• Contributes to the broader identity roadmap, advising leadership on platform strategy, emerging risks, and modernization opportunities.
• Supports the company's commitment to risk management and to protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.

Identity Governance Focus

• Progressive experience and advanced proficiency with Saviynt Enterprise Identity Cloud, including connector development, workflow configuration, rule and role engineering, and certification campaign design and execution.
• Expert understanding of identity governance administration constructs including attestations, analytics, connectors, rules, users, accounts, account ownership, roles, entitlements, entitlement ownership, security systems, and endpoints.
• DevOps support for IGA solutions to include incident and request management and implementation of new functionality including new integrations.
• Experience integrating IGA solutions with two or more platforms such as Active Directory, Entra ID, Okta, Workday, ServiceNow, and Amazon Web Services.
• Working knowledge of SQL, REST, SOAP, JSON, XML, Groovy, and PowerShell.
• Experience developing and testing new integrations and configurations, including API testing through tools such as Postman.

Minimum Qualifications

• Education and experience typically obtained through completion of a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Systems, Information Assurance, Cybersecurity or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Typically a minimum 5 years of progressive relevant experience in identity and access management, including hands on implementation and operation of enterprise IGA platforms in production.
• Minimum 3 years of hands on production experience with Saviynt Enterprise Identity Cloud, or equivalent depth in a comparable enterprise IGA platform with demonstrated ability to transition to Saviynt.
• Deep command of identity governance principles including access certification, segregation of duties, RBAC and ABAC design, entitlement management, and least privilege enforcement.
• Proven experience designing and automating identity lifecycle processes across heterogeneous systems.
• Strong working knowledge of core identity and access concepts including directory services, authentication, and federation (SAML, OIDC, OAuth), single sign on, multi factor authentication, and identity lifecycle management.
• Proficiency with scripting and integration technologies including Python, PowerShell, SQL, and REST APIs.
• Demonstrated testing experience across both manual and automated approaches, including test planning, execution, and validation of integrations and workflows against functional and security requirements.
• Strong requirements engineering ability, including eliciting requirements, decomposing complex needs into discrete components, and translating them into usable solutions and design.
• Demonstrated experience supporting audit and compliance requirements in a regulated environment.
• Track record of operating at a senior engineering level, including owning technical solutions end to end, resolving ambiguous problems independently, and influencing partners and stakeholders.
• Ability to perform duties independently, without direct supervision and detailed guidance.
• Ability to work in a fast paced dynamic environment that often requires shifting priorities.
• Strong organizational and time management skills with the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively with team members and cross functional teams.
• Comfortable working in Windows and macOS end user compute environments.
• Background and drug screen.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience in financial services, financial technology, or another highly regulated industry.
• Saviynt certification or equivalent demonstrated expertise.
• Effective delivery in a highly regulated environment such as PCI DSS.
• Exposure to complementary IGA and IAM tooling such as SailPoint, Oracle Identity Manager, CyberArk, Delinea, or Okta, and familiarity with privileged access management concepts.
• Microsoft Azure and AWS cloud experience, including governing access to cloud workloads.
• Proficiency with Active Directory PKI, key management, certificate authority, or related platforms.
• Experience working within Agile or SAFe delivery models and CMMI aligned process maturity.
• Ability to drive strategy sessions for the planning, development, and delivery of work efforts.
• Other IAM or information security role based certifications.

The above job description is not intended to be an all inclusive list of duties and standards of the position. Incumbents will follow instructions and perform other related duties as assigned by their supervisor.

Physical Requirements

Working conditions consist of a normal office environment. Work is primarily sedentary and requires extensive use of a computer and involves sitting for periods of approximately four hours. Work may require occasional standing, walking, kneeling, and reaching. Must be able to lift ten pounds occasionally and/or negligible amount of force frequently. Requires visual acuity and dexterity to view, prepare, and manipulate documents and office equipment including personal computers. Requires the ability to communicate with internal and/or external customers.

Employee must be able to perform essential functions and physical requirements of position with or without reasonable accommodation.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States at the date of hire.

The base pay scale for this position in:

Chicago, IL in USD per year is: $108,000 - $149,000.

Additionally, candidates are eligible for a discretionary incentive plan and benefits.

This pay scale is subject to change and is not necessarily reflective of actual compensation that may be earned, nor a promise of any specific pay for any specific candidate, which is always dependent on legitimate factors considered at the time of job offer. Early Warning Services takes into consideration a variety of factors when determining a competitive salary offer, including, but not limited to, the job scope, market rates and geographic location of a position, candidate’s education, experience, training, and specialized skills or certification(s) in relation to the job requirements and compared with internal equity (peers). The business actively supports and reviews wage equity to ensure that pay decisions are not based on gender, race, national origin, or any other protected classes.

Some of the Ways We Prioritize Your Health and Happiness

• Healthcare Coverage - Competitive medical (PPO/HDHP), dental, and vision plans as well as company contributions to your Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax savings through flexible spending accounts (FSA) for commuting, health & dependent care expenses.

• 401(k) Retirement Plan - Featuring a 100% Company Safe Harbor Match on your first 6% deferral immediately upon eligibility.

• Paid Time Off - Flexible Time Off for Exempt (salaried) employees, as well as generous PTO for Non-Exempt (hourly) employees, plus 11 paid company holidays and a paid volunteer day.

• 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave

• Maven Family Planning - provides support through your Parenting journey including egg freezing, fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, early pediatrics, and returning to work.

And SO muchmore! We continue to enhance our program, so be sure to check our Benefits page here for the latest. Our team canshare more during the interview process!

Early Warning Services, LLC (“Early Warning”) considers for employment, hires, retains and promotes qualified candidates on the basis of ability, potential, and valid qualifications without regard to race, religious creed, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, protected veteran or disability status or any factor prohibited by law, and as such affirms in policy and practice to support and promote equal employment opportunity and affirmative action, in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and municipal laws. The company also prohibits discrimination on other bases such as medical condition, marital status or any other factor that is irrelevant to the performance of our employees.

Early Warning Services LLC is a proud participant in E-Verify, a federal program to help ensure a legal and authorized workforce. As part of our hiring process, we electronically verify the employment eligibility of all new hires through E-Verify. For more information on your rights and responsibilities under E-Verify please visit Home | E-Verify.