Cloud Security Architect (IAM and GCP)

Job Type: Contract

Job Location: Sheffield

Overview

A leading global financial services organisation is undertaking a major multi-year Identity & Access Management (IAM) transformation programme to modernise and enhance identity services across a complex international technology landscape.

The programme will redefine how identities are managed across the enterprise, spanning workforce, privileged, machine, agent, and workload identities. As part of this transformation, a number of next-generation identity capabilities and platforms will be designed and implemented using modern cloud-native technologies and security principles.

We are seeking an experienced Solution Architect / Design Engineer to provide technical leadership across the programme, define target-state architectures, and ensure the successful delivery of secure, scalable, resilient, and supportable identity solutions.

The successful candidate will work closely with architects, engineering teams, security stakeholders, and technology partners to translate business, security, and regulatory requirements into enterprise-grade IAM solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Produce High-Level Designs (HLDs) and Low-Level Designs (LLDs) for identity capabilities.
• Define end-to-end solution architectures across business, application, data, security, and infrastructure domains.
• Translate business, security, operational, and regulatory requirements into technical solutions.
• Develop architecture patterns, standards, and reference designs.
• Define integration patterns between identity platforms, applications, infrastructure, and cloud services.
• Design cloud-native identity solutions within containerised and cloud environments.
• Define authentication, authorisation, federation, and access control architectures.
• Design and support Human Identity, Agent Identity, and Workload Identity capabilities.
• Develop Zero Trust security architectures and trust boundary models.
• Design API security, service-to-service authentication, and workload authentication frameworks.
• Develop event-driven integration patterns using messaging and asynchronous processing technologies.
• Design Policy Decision Point (PDP) and Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) architectures using Policy-as-Code principles.
• Define PKI, certificate lifecycle management, secrets management, and cryptographic integration patterns.
• Design highly available, resilient, and disaster recovery capable solutions.
• Ensure solutions meet security, performance, scalability, resilience, and operational requirements.
• Produce architecture decision records (ADRs) and technical design documentation.
• Participate in Architecture Reviews, Design Authorities, and governance processes.
• Conduct technical assurance and solution reviews across internal and third-party deliveries.
• Identify risks, assumptions, issues, constraints, and dependencies across programme workstreams.
• Collaborate with Enterprise Architecture teams to ensure alignment to strategic target-state architecture.
• Support engineering teams throughout implementation, testing, and production readiness activities.
• Mentor engineers and promote architecture and engineering best practices.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and identity solutions against programme requirements.
• Support roadmap planning and future-state architecture development.