| Location | St. Louis, MO |
The Technical Architect provides architectural leadership for Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Non-Human Identity (NHI) capabilities across the enterprise.
This role translates enterprise architecture direction, business requirements, and security objectives into actionable technical architectures, standards, and reusable design patterns that enable engineering teams to independently implement and operate solutions.
The Technical Architect establishes architectural consistency, guides technology adoption, and provides design assurance to ensure solutions are secure, scalable, resilient, and maintainable.
Working collaboratively with Enterprise Architecture, Business Solution Architecture, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure, and Engineering teams, this role supports the modernization of enterprise identity security capabilities while reducing technical complexity and organizational risk.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Architecture & Standards
• Define and maintain PAM and NHI technical reference architectures, standards, and reusable design patterns.
• Establish architectural requirements for privileged access, machine identities, workload identities, secrets management, and credential lifecycle management.
• Develop and maintain an architecture pattern catalog aligned with enterprise reference architectures and standards.
• Evaluate competing technologies and architectural approaches, documenting trade-offs involving security, scalability, resiliency, performance, and maintainability.
• Promote standardized, interoperable, and cloud-native identity security architectures.
Solution Design & Architectural Assurance
• Lead technical design reviews to ensure alignment with approved architectures, standards, and security requirements.
• Evaluate alternative technical approaches and document architectural decisions, trade-offs, and constraints.
• Establish clear architectural boundaries, integration patterns, and design requirements for engineering teams.
• Produce architecture deliverables that enable engineering teams to independently implement and maintain solutions.
• Evaluate architectural deviations and recommend appropriate remediation, compensating controls, or risk escalation.
• Provide architectural oversight throughout implementation without assuming engineering delivery ownership.
PAM & NHI Governance Architecture
• Establish technical architecture standards supporting enterprise PAM and NHI governance capabilities.
• Define architectural requirements for identity discovery, inventory, ownership, classification, and lifecycle management.
• Establish technical standards for credential issuance, rotation, expiration, revocation, and decommissioning.
• Define architecture patterns supporting service accounts, application identities, API identities, workload identities, and machine credentials.
• Support adoption of passwordless authentication, ephemeral credentials, workload identity federation, and least-privilege access.
• Ensure governance requirements can be consistently implemented across enterprise platforms.
Security, Compliance & Risk Alignment
• Apply secure-by-design principles to PAM and NHI architectures.
• Ensure technical architecture standards align with enterprise security policies, regulatory requirements, and industry frameworks.
• Define architectural controls supporting least privilege, separation of duties, credential protection, and identity lifecycle management.
• Identify architectural risks, control gaps, and technical dependencies.
• Support audit readiness through documented standards, architectural decisions, and traceable control requirements.
• Partner with Cybersecurity and Risk Management teams to evaluate architectural exceptions and remediation strategies.
Qualifications
Required Experience
• Demonstrated experience serving as a Technical Architect or Solution Architect for enterprise security or identity capabilities.
• Experience defining technical reference architectures, standards, and reusable patterns adopted by multiple engineering teams.
• Proven ability to evaluate competing technologies and architectural approaches, document trade-offs, and recommend solutions.
• Experience leading architecture reviews, resolving design conflicts, and establishing technical direction across teams.
• Demonstrated ability to translate architectural designs into actionable engineering requirements and successfully transition implementation ownership.
• Strong understanding of PAM, NHI, authentication, authorization, identity lifecycle management, and secrets management.
• Ability to influence technical decisions across teams without direct implementation authority.
Preferred Experience
• Enterprise PAM and secrets management platforms, such as CyberArk, Delinea, and HashiCorp Vault.
• Identity platforms and protocols, including Entra ID, Ping Identity, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID Connect.
• Machine and workload identity, including service principals, managed identities, and workload identity federation.
• Cloud and Kubernetes identity security architectures.
• Certificate lifecycle management, PKI, and ephemeral credentials.
• NHI governance, identity discovery, ownership, and lifecycle management.
• Zero Trust architecture and secure-by-design principles.
Additional Experience That Would Set You Apart
• SPIFFE/SPIRE and workload identity federation.
• AI agent identity, delegated authorization, and agentic security.
• Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) and Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR).
• Policy-based authorization and policy decision/enforcement frameworks.
• DevSecOps and infrastructure-as-code security integration.
Role Expectations
• This is an architecture-focused role, not an engineering implementation position.
Successful candidates must demonstrate the ability to establish technical direction, develop reusable architecture artifacts, influence design decisions, and enable engineering teams to independently deliver solutions.
Hands-on technical expertise is valued, but the primary responsibility is architectural leadership, technical governance, and design assurance—not direct ownership of engineering implementation.