Cyber Design SME

Role Title: Cyber Design SME

Duration: contract to run until 20/12/2026

Location: Sheffield. Hybrid, 3 days per week onsite

Rate: up to £570.40 p/d Umbrella inside IR35

Role purpose / summary

The Design SME will play a key role in delivering and operating enterprise Identity & Access Management (IAM) capabilities.Provides technical leadership across the IDAM 2.0 workstream, defining the target architecture and ensuring successful delivery of secure, scalable and supportable identity services.

The position works closely with IAM architects, business stakeholders and technology partners.

The client is undergoing a transformation of its Identity and Access Management practices including the delivery of a set of net new tools to overhaul how IAM is carried out in the industry. We are seeking experienced and dynamic Design SME who have an excellent understanding of Identity Management, with a successful track record of working in complex global organisations at fast pace. The role will report to the program and be part of a dynamic and highly skilled team. You will also provide end-to-end engineering and technical design for the IDAM 2.0 programme, translating business, security and regulatory requirements into secure, scalable and supportable identity solutions. Acts as the technical authority across multiple workstreams, ensuring architectural consistency, integration and alignment with the enterprise target state.

In this role, you will:

• Produce High Level Designs (HLDs) and Low Level Designs (LLDs) for identity capabilities.

• Define end-to-end Technical Solutions across business, application, data and infrastructure domains.

• Translate business, security and regulatory requirements into technical solutions.

• Develop reference architectures, patterns and design standards for the programme.

• Define integration patterns between identity platforms, applications and infrastructure.

• Design cloud-native solutions for GCP and Kubernetes environments.

• Define authentication, authorisation and federation architectures.

• Design Agent Identity, Human Identity and Workload Identity capabilities.

• Define Zero Trust security architecture and trust boundaries.

• Design API security, service-to-service authentication and workload authentication patterns.

• Develop event-driven integration architectures using messaging and asynchronous processing.

• Design Policy Decision Point (PDP) and Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) architectures using Policy-as-Code.

• Define secrets management, certificate lifecycle and PKI integration patterns.

• Design resilience, disaster recovery and high availability architectures.

• Ensure solutions meet non-functional requirements for security, scalability, resilience and performance.

• Produce architecture decision records (ADRs) and design documentation.

• Support governance through Architecture Review Boards and Design Authorities.

• Perform solution assurance and technical design reviews across supplier deliveries.

• Identify technical risks, assumptions, constraints and dependencies.

• Collaborate with Enterprise Architecture to ensure alignment with strategic architecture.

• Work with Product Owners to refine technical requirements and delivery priorities.

• Support engineering teams throughout implementation, testing and production readiness.

• Mentor engineers and promote engineering best practice.

• Evaluate new technologies and vendor products against programme requirements.

• Contribute to roadmap planning and future-state architecture.

Essential Skills

• Enterprise Architecture

• Identity and Access Management (IAM)

• Authentication and Authorisation

• Zero Trust Architecture

• Agent Identity and Workload Identity

• Identity Federation (OIDC, OAuth2, SAML, SCIM)

• Cloud Architecture (GCP)

• Kubernetes and Service Mesh

• API Architecture and Security

• Event-driven Architecture

• Policy-as-Code (OPA/Cedar)

• PKI, Certificates and Secrets Management

• DevSecOps and CI/CD

• High Availability and Resilience Design

• Security Architecture

• Architecture Governance

• Stakeholder Management

• Technical Leadership

All profiles will be reviewed against the required skills and experience. Due to the high number of applications we will only be able to respond to successful applicants in the first instance. We thank you for your interest and the time taken to apply!