The posting
About AvePoint:
Beyond Secure. AvePoint is the global leader in data security, governance, and resilience, going beyond traditional solutions to ensure a robust data foundation and enable organizations everywhere to collaborate with confidence. Over 25,000 customers worldwide rely on the AvePoint Confidence Platform to prepare, secure, and optimize their critical data across Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and other collaboration environments. AvePoint’s global channel partner program includes approximately 5,000 managed service providers, value-added resellers, and systems integrators, with our solutions available in more than 100 cloud marketplaces. To learn more, visit www.avepoint.com.
At AvePoint, we are committed to investing in our people. Agility, passion and teamwork set us up to do our best work and foster a culture where you are empowered to craft your career, make an impact, and own (y)our future. Unleash the power of you!
About the position:
The Principal Architect for Identity Security will serve as the senior technical authority for the security architecture of AvePoint’s identity resilience initiatives. This role is focused on how enterprise identity providers, identity control planes, privileged access systems, application identities, and hybrid identity environments are secured, trusted, contained, recovered, and validated before, during, and after a disaster or identity compromise. Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID are two of the most important identity platforms for this role, but the scope is broader than any single provider.
This role is intentionally separate from a platform-specific backup and recovery architect role. Backup and recovery architects may own the core backup, restore, rollback, topology, and source-of-authority architecture for specific platforms. This identity security architect owns the threat model, control-plane security, recovery trust model, incident-response integration points, secure restore guardrails, and post-recovery validation requirements that ensure identity resilience platforms can be trusted in adversarial conditions.
The ideal candidate has deep hands-on experience securing complex enterprise identity environments, including Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, hybrid identity, privileged access, application and workload identities, federation, identity governance integrations, and identity incident response. They can speak credibly with CISOs, identity architects, incident responders, platform engineers, and product leaders, while translating that expertise into product architecture, security requirements, and customer-facing recovery guidance.
This is not a generic IAM governance role and not a pure SOC analyst role. The right person understands identity as Tier-0 infrastructure, knows how attackers persist across identity systems, and can design product workflows that help customers prepare, recover, and validate a trusted known-good state after a serious incident.
Specific responsibilities include, but are not limited to:
- Own the security architecture for AvePoint’s identity resilience platforms, including threat modeling, recovery trust criteria, privileged-access safeguards, secure restore guardrails, and post-recovery validation workflows across major enterprise identity providers.
- Partner with platform backup and recovery architects to ensure identity restore, relationship recovery, policy recovery, and source-of-authority workflows operate safely under breach conditions, not just during normal administrative recovery.
- Define the product’s Tier-0 security model, including least privilege, just-in-time elevation, credential isolation, gMSA usage, privileged access workstation expectations, break-glass handling, secure service accounts, immutable audit trails, and separation of monitoring vs. restore permissions.
- Design security requirements for protecting the backup control plane: administrator roles, service app permissions, consented permissions, BYOS storage controls, network restrictions, key management, deletion approvals, retention tamper resistance, and recovery-data integrity validation.
- Define how the product should support pre-breach recovery readiness, including known-good state documentation, critical identity object inventory, break-glass validation guidance, restore permission validation, and out-of-band communications readiness.
- Architect secure workflows for identity breach recovery phases: trusted control, detection and triage support, user containment handoff, application and workload identity containment handoff, persistence review, environment trust decision gates, known-good restore, downstream workload recovery, and validation.
- Translate identity attack and persistence patterns into product requirements, including malicious application registrations, service-principal credential abuse, illicit consent grants, access-policy tampering, privileged role assignment changes, risky federation or trust changes, guest-user persistence, and group membership abuse.
- Define containment handoff requirements for identity security teams, including when the product should guide or warn customers about token/session revocation, password reset sequencing, service-principal credential rotation, app disablement, admin-consent review, and emergency Conditional Access controls.
- Design safe Conditional Access recovery patterns, including dependency validation, break-glass account protection, policy state handling, restore-as-disabled/report-only options where supported, and approval checkpoints before re-enabling high-impact policies.
- Design security requirements for application recovery, including generated app secrets, new key IDs, API permission re-consent, Enterprise Application permission caveats, SSO/provisioning validation, credential rotation workflows, and secure reporting of secrets or remediation tasks.
- Define how the product should compare current state against known-good backups without overclaiming detection: post-recovery-point objects, changed privileged assignments, changed app credentials, modified CA policies, changed Named Locations, and changed memberships.
- Own the security validation model after restore: critical object validation, privileged access validation, app/service-principal validation, CA dependency validation, break-glass access validation, manual remediation checklists, and evidence/reporting for security, audit, and compliance teams.
- Contribute deep expertise where identity platforms require specialized recovery security guidance, including Active Directory forest/domain trust risk, domain controller trust boundaries, krbtgt and privileged credential handling, AD CS and certificate abuse considerations, SYSVOL/GPO integrity, DNS trust assumptions, and safe sequencing during forest recovery.
- Partner with Product, Engineering, Architecture, Security, and Field teams to convert security and recovery requirements into epics, design reviews, acceptance criteria, test plans, and customer-facing recovery guidance.
- Conduct customer and field discovery with CISOs, incident responders, AD architects, Entra ID administrators, identity security teams, MSPs, and regulated/government customers to validate real-world security and recovery scenarios.
- Track competitor and market patterns across Microsoft, Semperis, Quest, Cayosoft, Rubrik, Commvault, Veeam, CrowdStrike Identity, Microsoft Defender for Identity, and related ITDR/identity-resilience vendors, with an emphasis on security and recovery workflows rather than generic feature comparison.
- Mentor internal engineering and product teams on AD/Entra security concepts, identity attack paths, recovery safety principles, and how to build security-first workflows for Tier-0 infrastructure.
What you will bring to our team:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Cybersecurity, or a related technical field; equivalent practical experience strongly considered.
- 12+ years of hands-on technical experience in identity infrastructure, cybersecurity architecture, incident response, or security engineering, with deep specialization in enterprise identity security.
- Direct experience securing or recovering complex identity environments, including Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, hybrid identity, federation, trust relationships, privileged access boundaries, application identities, workload identities, and ransomware or destructive-attack readiness.
- Deep understanding of AD security internals: Kerberos, NTLM, LDAP, ACLs/delegation, privileged groups, admin tiering, DCSync/replication rights, krbtgt rotation, golden/silver ticket risk, domain/forest trusts, SID history, SPNs, constrained/unconstrained/resource-based constrained delegation, SYSVOL/GPO security, DNS, and AD CS/PKI risk.
- Deep understanding of Entra ID security architecture: Conditional Access, PIM, privileged roles, administrative units, authentication methods, Identity Protection, app registrations, enterprise applications, service principals, OAuth consent, workload identities, cross-tenant access, federation, and token/session behavior.
- Strong understanding of hybrid identity security: Entra Connect, Cloud Sync, password hash sync, pass-through authentication, AD FS/federation, sourceAnchor/ImmutableID, hard/soft match, source-of-authority conflicts, and how on-premises compromise can affect Microsoft 365/Entra environments.
- Hands-on experience with identity incident response and recovery workflows, including compromised user containment, refresh-token/session revocation concepts, application/service-principal compromise response, API consent review, credential rotation, Conditional Access emergency response, and persistence removal.
- Experience designing security architecture for high-privilege tools or platforms that operate against Tier-0 infrastructure, including secure credential handling, least privilege, separation of duties, audit logging, tamper resistance, approval workflows, and customer-managed key/storage models.
- Familiarity with disaster recovery and business continuity requirements for identity systems, including RTO/RPO tradeoffs, known-good baselines, clean recovery environments, in-place vs. clean-tenant recovery decisions, and post-restore validation.
- Ability to translate complex security requirements into product requirements, architecture patterns, workflow guardrails, customer-facing warnings, and acceptance criteria that engineering teams can implement.
- Strong customer-facing credibility with CISOs, identity architects, AD engineers, SOC/IR teams, compliance leaders, and executive stakeholders.
- Demonstrated ability to lead without authority across Product, Engineering, Security, Architecture, Customer Success, Sales Engineering, and partner teams.
- Bonus: Experience working at or with vendors that build AD/Entra backup, recovery, ITDR, identity protection, or hybrid identity resilience products, such as Semperis, Quest, Cayosoft, Microsoft, Rubrik, Commvault, Veeam, CrowdStrike Identity, Mandiant, or equivalent.
- Bonus: Experience with Microsoft Defender for Identity, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk, CrowdStrike, Semperis DSP, Quest, Cayosoft Guardian, or similar identity detection/response ecosystems.
- Bonus: Relevant certifications or recognition such as Microsoft Certified: Cybersecurity Architect Expert, Identity and Access Administrator, CISSP, GIAC, Microsoft MVP, or equivalent hands-on expertise.
The Salary Range for this role is $180,000k - $270,000. At AvePoint, we strive to offer competitive, fair, and equitable total rewards. The listed salary range represents a good faith estimate, with final offers based on location, experience, skills, and qualifications. The listed range reflects base salary only; our total rewards include base salary, comprehensive benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k) with match, unlimited PTO), and depending on the role, bonuses, commissions, or equity (RSUs). We welcome compensation discussions—apply even if your expectations fall outside the range.
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