Senior Manager, Identity and Access Management

About the role

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career. Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

Responsibilities

• Program strategy and direction: IAM strategy, capability roadmap, program priorities, business case, executive sponsorship.
• Team leadership: leading, coaching, developing a team of identity engineers and analysts, including hiring, goal setting, performance management.
• Identity governance and lifecycle: automated joiner, mover, leaver processes driven by authoritative HR, student, affiliate systems; enterprise identity data model and registry; role and entitlement design; separation-of-duties policy; access certification via closed-loop remediation.
• Authentication and federation: SSO, MFA, passwordless authentication, federation with partners and peer institutions, accessible authentication and account recovery for all populations.
• Privileged and non-human identity: credential vaulting, session control, just-in-time elevation, break-glass procedures, reduction of standing privilege for service accounts, enterprise secrets, AI agents, autonomous workloads.
• Identity security operations: identity threat detection and response, identity security posture management, remediation of permission drift and orphaned accounts, identity lead during security incident response.
• Service reliability: availability, resilience, disaster recovery for authentication and other IAM services, defined service levels, tested failover.
• Policy, compliance, and audit: access control policy and standards, identity governance exception adjudication, least-privilege access under FERPA, GLBA, PCI DSS, control mapping against NIST CSF and NIST SP 800-53, audit and assessor response.
• Architecture and standards: IAM reference architecture, technical standards, integration patterns, review and approval of new identity designs from project/application teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in a related field and 7 years of information security or identity and access management experience, or 10 years of industry experience working in security.
• Hands‑on experience developing or leading an IAM program.
• 3+ years of people leadership experience.
• One or more industry security certifications (CISSP, CISM, or a recognized identity and access management certification).
• Depth in identity governance and administration: lifecycle automation, provisioning, role and entitlement design, access certification, separation of duties.
• Command of identity and access standards (SAML, OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, SCIM, LDAP) and multi‑factor/passwordless authentication.
• Experience with privileged access management