Operations Manager – Identity and Access Management (IAM)

By Light Professional IT Services LLC readies warfighters and federal agencies with technology and systems engineered to connect, protect, and prepare individuals and teams for whatever comes next. Headquartered in McLean, VA, By Light supports defense, civilian, and commercial IT customers worldwide.

Our firm is seeking an experienced Operations Manager to oversee a mission-critical enterprise Identity and Access Management (IAM) program supporting a major federal agency. This IAM system is a foundational element of the agency’s IT infrastructure, ensuring secure access to resources across the organization. The role requires a leader who can manage operations with the highest level of rigor, ensure system uptime, and maintain compliance with federal security policies.

• Lead and manage a multidisciplinary team of operations, support engineers, and administrators responsible for the IAM system’s availability, performance, and security.
• Ensure the ongoing health and operational status of the IAM system, maintaining high availability, performance monitoring, and reliability.
• Oversee incident response, root cause analysis, and problem resolution to minimize service disruptions and downtime.
• Collaborate closely with the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team to implement reliability improvement strategies, monitoring solutions, and automation processes to enhance system uptime and performance.
• Develop and optimize Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for the deployment, configuration, monitoring, and management of IAM resources.
• Work with agency stakeholders to maintain and improve processes around user access, identity lifecycle management, and compliance.
• Coordinate the implementation of new IAM features and upgrades in a manner that aligns with system reliability and security best practices.
• Collaborate with security teams to ensure IAM systems adhere to all security requirements, including periodic vulnerability assessments, logging, and auditing.
• Drive continuous improvement through automation, monitoring, and proactive issue identification to ensure system scalability and cost-effectiveness.
• Ensure compliance with disaster recovery and business continuity requirements, including executing regular failover testing and recovery plans.
• Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and improve system uptime and service levels.

• 10+ years of experience managing mission-critical IT operations, preferably in a federal government or highly regulated environment.
• 7+ years of direct experience in Identity and Access Management (IAM) operations or related fields.
• Experience working in an Agile DEVOPS environment and SAFe.
• Hands-on experience with automation tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Jenkins) and CI/CD processes or managing a team that performs automation.
• Proven experience collaborating with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to enhance system reliability, optimize monitoring strategies, and automate issue resolution.
• Strong leadership and communication skills to mentor and manage technical teams, as well as interface with senior agency officials.
• Proven experience with implementing and supporting IAM Single Sign On (SSO) solutions.
• Solid understanding of identity lifecycle management, authentication methods (SAML, OAuth, MFA), and directory services (LDAP, Active Directory).
• Familiarity with federal IT security and compliance standards (FISMA, NIST SP 800-53).
• Strong knowledge of system monitoring tools, incident management frameworks, and automation practices (e.g., using tools like Splunk or ServiceNow).
• Experience with cloud services (AWS, Azure) and hybrid environments.
• Excellent problem-solving and decision-making skills.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, IT, or a related field.
• Splunk certification.
• Familiarity with IAM integrations with other enterprise security services.
• Previous experience supporting federal identity governance initiatives.

Soft Skills:

• Demonstrate strong servant leadership, fostering a collaborative and high-performing team environment.
• Thrive in a fast-paced environment, adapting quickly to new challenges and priorities.
• Possess excellent communication skills and can effectively present to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Must be able to obtain a Public Trust.