Senior Director, Identity Governance

About the role

The Sr. Director of Identity Governance leads and operates the enterprise identity program across the Hearst Corporation, supporting over 25,000 user accounts across 360+ global businesses. This role owns the full identity lifecycle, including access certification, role-based access control, and privilege management, while also driving strategic initiatives and vendor relationships.

Responsibilities

• Co-author enterprise IAM policies and standards in partnership with Information Security, Risk and Compliance.
• Lead the design and operation of access certification programs, ensuring timely, risk-appropriate review of entitlements across applications, infrastructure, and privileged systems.
• Architect and mature the enterprise role model, including role-based access control (RBAC) design, role mining, role lifecycle management, and separation of duties (SoD) frameworks.
• Drive the joiner/mover/leaver (JML) lifecycle program, ensuring identity provisioning and deprovisioning is accurate, automated where possible, and tightly integrated with HR systems of record.
• Establish and enforce least-privilege principles across the enterprise, with a structured approach to identifying and remediating access sprawl, orphaned accounts, and over-privileged roles.
• Participate in and support audit activities conducted by internal audit, external auditors, and regulatory bodies, providing documentation, walkthroughs, and remediation support as required.
• Partner with the Information Security, Risk and Compliance teams to ensure identity governance controls satisfy SOX, HIPAA, and PCI DSS requirements, and support audit activities with documentation, walkthroughs, and evidence.
• Define and execute the multi-year strategy for Hearst’s enterprise identity program, spanning governance, access management, privileged access, secrets management, and directory services, aligned with corporate security, compliance, and technology objectives.
• Represent the identity program in senior leadership forums, steering committees, and technology strategy discussions.
• Champion an automation-first and AI-forward approach across the identity program, identifying opportunities to apply automation, AI, and generative AI to drive process efficiency, reduce operational cost, and accelerate delivery of identity services.
• Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing identity team of 5–9 direct reports, including engineers, architects, and operational staff.
• Recruit, onboard, and retain top identity talent, building team depth and succession coverage across critical functions.
• Build and maintain strong partnerships with Hearst’s business division technology teams, serving as a trusted advisor and primary escalation point for identity services.
• Develop and communicate a clear service catalog for identity platform offerings, enabling business units to understand and consume available services effectively.
• Lead regular business reviews with key internal customers, gathering feedback and translating it into program improvements.
• Communicate identity program status, risks, milestones, and value delivery to senior leadership and executive stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of progressive IT experience, with at least 10 years in identity governance, identity and access management, or a closely related discipline.
• 4+ years in a people management capacity, with demonstrated success leading and developing technical teams.
• Deep, principled understanding of identity governance concepts: joiner/mover/leaver lifecycle design, role engineering and RBAC modeling, access certification program design, separation of duties frameworks, least-privilege strategy, entitlement ownership models, and identity policy development.
• Candidates should be able to discuss these concepts independently of any specific tool or platform.
• Proven track record designing and maturing enterprise IGA programs at scale, including building or significantly advancing certification, provisioning, and role management capabilities in complex, multi-application environments.
• Hands-on experience operating Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) platforms such as SailPoint, Saviynt, One Identity, Microsoft Entra ID Governance, or similar; depth in IGA concepts is required, specific vendor experience is transferable.
• Hands-on experience operating Identity Provider (IdP) and SSO platforms such as Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Ping Identity, ForgeRock, or similar; depth in federation protocols (SAML, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SCIM) and access policy design is required.
• Working knowledge of Privileged Access Management (PAM) concepts and platforms such as CyberArk, BeyondTrust, Delinea or similar, including vault design, just-in-time access, and session management.
• Working knowledge of secrets management platforms and practices, including integration patterns with applications and CI/CD pipelines.
• Solid understanding of Windows Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID in a hybrid enterprise environment, including Group Policy, directory synchronization, and Conditional Access.
• Experience supporting compliance programs involving SOX, HIPAA, and/or PCI DSS access controls, including audit participation and evidence preparation.
• Demonstrated experience managing vendor relationships, software licensing, contract negotiations, and IT cost optimization.
• Strong executive communication skills with the ability to translate complex identity governance concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Cybersecurity, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.