Engineering Manager, Identity & Access Management (IAM)

About The Role

Customers trust Lambda with their infrastructure, workloads, and data. Security is foundational to earning that trust, and Identity and Access Management is at the heart of it – the control plane that determines who and what can access every Lambda resource. Enterprise and hyperscaler customers require the ability to federate their corporate identities, manage human and machine access, enforce least privilege, protect data with keys they control, and audit activity across their environments. We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Identity and Access Management team and define how identity, authentication, authorization, and key-management services are built and scaled across Lambda Cloud. This team owns the foundational identity and authorization services on the critical path for every Lambda product – spanning APIs, Console, Kubernetes products, and cloud services – including identity federation, SSO, SCIM, users and groups, service and workload identities, RBAC, resource hierarchy, policy enforcement, and audit integration.

This is a technically engaged leadership role. You will own execution, team health, and organizational direction working with technical leadership on architecture, strategy and design decisions for services that must be highly available, low latency and resilient. You will also drive alignment across Security, Product, Compliance, and customer-facing teams to build durable platform capabilities that are adopted consistently across Lambda's services. This role is ideal for an engineering leader who has built security-critical distributed systems and wants to shape the identity and access foundation of a fast-growing cloud platform.

What You'll Do

• Build, lead, and grow the IAM engineering team. Hire exceptional engineers, develop technical leaders, and create a culture of ownership and high engineering standards.
• Work closely with the IAM technical leaders to define and deliver the long-term technical and architectural strategy for Lambda's IAM platform.
• Build secure, scalable identity capabilities for people, services, and workloads from federation and SSO to service and workload identity.
• Evolve the authorization platform – RBAC, policy evaluation, and resource hierarchy with least privilege and auditability as defaults.
• Make IAM easy to adopt across every Lambda service through consistent APIs, resource and action models, and integration standards.
• Build and own Lambda's Key Management Service, including customer-managed keys, HSM-backed protection, key lifecycle controls, and integration across compute, storage, and networking.
• Own the reliability, security, performance, and operations of mission-critical IAM services including observability, safe rollouts, incident response, and disaster recovery.
• Translate enterprise requirements into durable platform capabilities, and communicate strategy, delivery, risk, and operational health clearly to senior leadership.
• Balance the complexity and flexibility required for enterprise-grade IAM with simple, intuitive experiences for customers with varying levels of identity and access expertise.

You Have

• 9+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years leading and developing engineering teams in a fast-paced environment.
• Have built and operated large-scale distributed systems with high availability, security, and reliability requirements.
• Bring strong technical judgment across cloud infrastructure and IAM — authentication, authorization, workload identity, privileged access, and policy enforcement.
• Can engage deeply in architecture, pressure-test designs, and guide tradeoffs across security, correctness, scale, performance, and operability.
• Have a strong track record of building high-performing teams and developing engineers and technical leaders through periods of growth and change.
• Have driven cross-functional platform or security initiatives and influenced teams and leaders without direct authority.
• Can turn ambiguous infrastructure problems into clear strategy, pragmatic execution, and broadly adopted platform capabilities.
• Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders and set a high bar for engineering quality, operational discipline, and ownership.
• Hold a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field, or have 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.

Note: This position requires presence in our San Francisco or San Jose office location 4 days per week; Lambda's designated work from home day is currently Tuesday.