Principal Engineer (S) - Identity and Access Management

As a Principal Engineer (PE) within Identity & Access Management (IAM), you will champion and influence long-term vision for identity security in an AI-enabled enterprise. This role is focused on lifting Thrivent’s IAM capabilities by providing technical leadership for Thrivents Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategy, enabling teams to deliver secure, scalable, observable, and low-friction identity capabilities across the enterprise. As the organizations senior IAM technical authority, this role will shape the future of digital trust by addressing emerging capabilities such as Agentic AI, Generative AI, machine identities, autonomous systems, and digital workforce technologies. The role drives the evolution of authentication, authorization, governance, and identity-centric security, ensuring teams can securely consume IAM capabilities through scalable, composable, and product-oriented services rather than one-off implementations. In addition, this leader is responsible for building and maturing the IAM organizations governance, detection, monitoring, and operational oversight capabilities, enabling proactive management of identity risk, policy compliance, privileged access activities, and emerging identity-based threats across the enterprise. Through the development of sustainable platforms, processes, and engineering practices, the role strengthens the IAM teams ability to govern, monitor, detect, and respond at scale while advancing the organizations overall security posture.
You will operate at the intersection of cybersecurity, AI, enterprise architecture, and product engineering, translating rapidly evolving technology trends into secure, scalable, and resilient identity capabilities so that teams can adopt, operate, and stay up to date with consistent, versioned offerings. You will influence technology direction across portfolios, establish enterprise standards and guardrails, mentor engineering leaders, and partner with executive stakeholders to ensure Thrivents identity ecosystem remains secure and future-ready and aligned to product/platform outcomes.
This includes building reusable IAM capabilities, patterns, and guardrails that enable and upskill product, engineering, and platform teams to deliver identity-related solutions with greater autonomy and confidence. Success also requires fostering strong cross-functional partnerships to rapidly design and implement secure, scalable solutions, reducing delivery friction while maintaining appropriate governance, risk management, and security outcomes.

Lead the technical direction for enterprise identity security by defining and advancing scalable architectures, engineering practices, and security controls for human identities, non-human identities, AI agents, APIs, workloads, and autonomous platforms, driving engineering excellence and secure adoption across teams and platforms.
Advance adaptive authentication and risk-based access decisions informed by behavioral analytics, AI-driven risk signals, device posture, and contextual intelligence.
Influence technology and security roadmaps across Engineering, Infrastructure, Cyber Defense, Digital, Data, and Enterprise Architecture teams.
Lead the technical direction for enterprise identity security by defining and advancing scalable architectures, engineering practices, and security controls for human identities, non-human identities, AI agents, APIs, workloads, and autonomous platforms, driving engineering excellence and secure adoption across teams and platforms.
Create frameworks to manage agent accountability, auditability, and policy enforcement.
Develop enterprise strategies for secrets management, workload identity, service accounts, API security, and machine credential lifecycle management.
Reduce risks associated with identity sprawl as autonomous systems proliferate.
AI-Driven Identity Operations
Champion intelligent automation within IAM, leveraging AI to improve access reviews, entitlement analysis, role mining, policy recommendations, and anomaly detection.
Engineer monitoring and detection capabilities for anomalous agent behavior across AI agents, machine identities, and autonomous workflows, working directly with other teams to embed these signals into existing detection and response pipelines.
Continuously evaluate and introduce modern security technologies and approaches to address AI-era risks.
Partner with product teams and engineering teams to build AI and identity security requirements directly into technical designs, user stories, and delivery.
Build and promote engineering standards, secure-by-default patterns, and reusable reference implementations that teams can adopt directly.
Influence senior leadership on AI and identity risk posture, threat evolution, and the technical investments needed to stay ahead.
Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or related technical field, or equivalent work experience.
~10+ years of experience in security engineering or related field.
~ Deep knowledge of modern threats, attack techniques, and detection engineering.
~ Experience with threat modeling, incident response, and security operations.
~ Proven ability to evaluate protocols, practices, and patterns based on enterprise fit, risk management, operability, and adoption at scale.
Advance adaptive authentication and risk-based access decisions informed by behavioral analytics, AI-driven risk signals, device posture, and contextual intelligence.
Pay TransparencyThrivent’s long-term growth depends on attracting, rewarding, and retaining people who are committed to helping others thrive with purpose. The applicable salary or hourly wage range for this full-time role is $161,436.00 - $218,415.00 per year, which factors in various geographic regions. Thrivent is unique in our commitment to helping people to be wise with money and live balanced and generous lives. The following benefits may be offered: various bonuses (including, for example, annual or long-term incentives); medical, dental, and vision insurance; health savings account; flexible spending account; pension; disability insurance; 10 paid company holidays; EAP; Eligibility for receipt of these benefits is subject to the applicable plan/policy documents. Thrivent’s plans/policies are subject to change at any time at Thrivent’s discretion.

Thrivent provides Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) without regard to race, religion, color,

sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, national origin, age, disability, marital status, citizenship status, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable local, state, or federal law. This policy applies to all employees and job applicants.
Thrivent is committed to providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. Remote