Senior Director of Engineering, Identity Governance

Job description

The Role As Senior Director of Engineering for Identity Governance, you will own the engineering strategy and execution for Veza's identity governance and lifecycle management capabilities — including access reviews, lifecycle management (LCM), and the platform's ServiceNow integration surface. You will partner closely with Product, Security, Infrastructure, Customer Success, and executive leadership to deliver scalable, secure, highly reliable enterprise software that governs who has access to what, and why. You will be responsible for developing engineering leaders, raising the technical bar, improving execution, and ensuring Veza's identity governance platform can scale to support rapidly growing enterprise adoption — including deep integration into ServiceNow workflows. Responsibilities Engineering Leadership • Lead and scale engineering teams across Access Security & ServiceNow Integrations, LCM, Access Review, and FE Platform & Design Systems. • Establish engineering strategy, priorities, operating mechanisms, and measurable objectives across the identity governance portfolio. • Build a culture of technical excellence, ownership, accountability, and innovation. • Hire, mentor, and retain exceptional engineering managers, staff engineers, and individual contributors. • Develop the next generation of engineering leaders and establish strong succession plans. • Partner with executive leadership on organizational design and long-term engineering strategy. Technical & Platform Strategy • Define and execute the technical vision for Veza's identity governance and administration (IGA) capabilities — lifecycle management, and access review workflows. • Drive architecture decisions across distributed systems, data platforms, APIs, and the ServiceNow integration layer. • Ensure the platform can ingest, normalize, and reason over identity, entitlement, and access lifecycle data at enterprise scale. • Own the technical strategy for how Veza's governance capabilities surface inside ServiceNow — balancing native integration depth against delivery speed. • Lead initiatives focused on scalability, availability, performance, security, and reliability across governance workflows. • Establish strong architectural principles for the shared FE platform and design system that underpin governance UX. • Champion investments in platform foundations, developer productivity, automation, and reduction of technical debt. Product Engineering • Partner with Product leadership to translate customer and market requirements — particularly around access certification cycles, joiner/mover/leaver lifecycle events, and governance audit requirements — into an effective engineering roadmap. • Drive predictable execution of complex, cross-team initiatives spanning Access Review, LCM, and ServiceNow Integrations. • Ensure engineering teams maintain a strong focus on customer outcomes, audit/compliance requirements, and product quality. • Participate in strategic customer discussions when technical leadership is required, particularly for enterprise governance and compliance conversations. • Help define and prioritize governance capabilities that differentiate Veza in the enterprise security and compliance market. Security & Reliability • Maintain a high engineering bar for security, privacy, compliance, and operational resilience — critical given the audit and compliance nature of governance workflows. • Establish robust practices for testing, observability, incident response, and production operations. • Ensure the governance platform meets the reliability, security, and auditability expectations of large enterprise and regulated customers. • Partner closely with Security and Infrastructure leadership on threat modeling, secure development, and platform resilience. Engineering Operations • Establish effective planning, prioritization, and execution processes across the governance engineering org. • Improve predictability of delivery without creating unnecessary process overhead. • Define and monitor meaningful engineering metrics around quality, velocity, reliability, and customer/audit impact. • Drive continuous improvement across development, testing, release, and operational processes. • Identify and remove organizational and technical bottlenecks, including those arising from ServiceNow platform dependencies. Qualifications • 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering organizations at the Director/Senior Director level. • Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams and developing engineering managers and senior technical leaders. • Experience building and operating enterprise SaaS, cloud platforms, security products, or distributed systems at scale. • Strong technical background in distributed systems, cloud architecture, data platforms, APIs, and modern software engineering. • Experience with identity governance, lifecycle management, IAM, IGA, or related compliance-driven domains is highly desirable. • Demonstrated ability to lead complex, cross-functional initiatives from strategy through production. • Track record of recruiting and retaining high-performing engineering organizations. • Strong business judgment and ability to connect engineering investments to customer, audit, and compliance outcomes. • Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate effectively with executive leadership. Preferred Experience • Enterprise security or cybersecurity background. • Direct experience with Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), access certification/attestation, or lifecycle management (joiner/mover/leaver) systems. • Experience integrating a product natively into a large platform ecosystem (e.g., ServiceNow, Salesforce) — including navigating a partner platform's own architecture and release cycles. • Experience with policy engines, entitlement systems, or large-scale access/identity data. • Experience owning a frontend platf