Principal Engineering Manager, Identity & Access Management

GitHub is looking for a Principal Engineering Manager to lead Identity and Access Management for its workforce and production systems. Identity is foundational to GitHub's regulatory commitments, cloud strategy, internal security model, and the trust boundaries protecting access to critical infrastructure. You will lead the team responsible for GitHub's IAM platform across identity lifecycle, entitlements, privileged access, identity federation, workforce identity providers, and secured administrative access patterns, systems that sit on the critical path for employee productivity and production security. The role requires both deep technical judgment and strong organizational leadership, shaping an identity foundation where access decisions are increasingly automated, policy-driven, and consumable by both humans and agents.

Responsibilities

• Lead the engineering strategy and technical roadmap for GitHub's IAM service area, spanning identity lifecycle, entitlements, privileged access, federation, and workforce identity providers.
• Build and support high-performing engineering teams by coaching engineers, managing performance, and fostering a culture of ownership, inclusion, and operational excellence.
• Drive multi-quarter IAM platform evolution, including identity provider migrations, privileged access maturation, least-privilege access models, and identity platform consolidation.
• Partner with Security, Infrastructure, IT, Compliance, Legal, and product engineering teams to define requirements and ensure IAM systems meet security, regulatory, reliability, and usability needs.
• Make secure access the easiest path through paved paths, automation, APIs, and agent-consumable interfaces rather than manual processes.
• Oversee reliability and operational maturity for Tier-0 IAM services: incident response, postmortems, observability, deployment safety, and systemic reduction of toil.
• Guide teams in designing scalable, secure, observable systems supporting least privilege, just-in-time access, strong authentication, auditability, and identity governance at GitHub scale.
• Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, architecture guidance, quality practices, and mentorship across the IAM organization.

Qualifications

• 11+ years of software engineering experience delivering production software in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Rust, or Python (less with a relevant degree, or equivalent experience).
• 5+ years of people management experience.
• Preferred: experience leading teams responsible for identity, access management, infrastructure security, internal developer platforms, or other Tier-0 production services.
• Preferred: experience with identity directories and providers (Okta, Entra ID / Azure AD) and patterns including OAuth, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, and LDAP.
• Preferred: experience leading large-scale identity platform migrations or consolidations with parity validation, phased cutovers, and rollback strategies.
• Preferred: strong understanding of privileged access management, least privilege, just-in-time access, and operating security-critical services in Azure, AWS, or GCP.