Lead Engineer, Authentication Engineering

At Allstate, great things happen when our people work together to protect families and their belongings from life's uncertainties. And for more than 90 years, our innovative drive has kept us a step ahead of our customers' evolving needs. From advocating for seat belts, air bags and graduated driving laws, to being an industry leader in pricing sophistication, telematics, and, more recently, device and identity protection.

Job Description

We are seeking a highly technical and innovative Lead Engineer, Authentication Engineering to lead the design, implementation, and advancement of enterprise authentication platforms. Multiple Managing Engineers for authentication teams will report to this role. This role will provide technical leadership for authentication solutions, including directory infrastructure, multi-factor authentication (MFA), PKI, privileged access management and vaulting solutions and an in-house developed application for password and MFA management.

The successful candidate will partner closely with Product Management, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Engineering, Application Teams, and Operations to deliver secure, scalable, and resilient authentication capabilities that align with strategic directions including AI enablement, Zero Trust, Infrastructure as Code, and automation.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with Authentication Lead Product Manager for creation of strategy, roadmaps, prioritization, and implementation of solutions.
• Lead the strategy, architecture, and engineering of enterprise authentication solutions, ensuring they meet business needs while delivering a secure, seamless user experience.
• Design, implement, and modernize authentication solutions, including MFA,, PKI, SSO, privileged access management, vaulting, and cloud-native authentication platforms to enable Zero Trust capabilities including passwordless, phishing-resistant authentication, Just-In-Time (JIT) and Just-Enough (JEA) access.
• Drive increased automation and Infrastructure as Code including test driven development practices for validation and control testing
• Lead large-scale authentication migrations and technology transformations, while continuously improving platforms to reduce user friction and increase adoption.
• Partner with security, infrastructure, cloud, application, and AI teams to deliver scalable, resilient authentication services and support security integration into application d automation, AI workflows, agentic AI capabilities.
• Provide technical leadership and people development by coaching Managing Engineers, leading technical product design reviews, and providing direction for engineering best practices.
• Influence clients and partners to prioritize for enterprise benefit and risk reduction and assist in driving the adoption of technology solutions that leverage existing patterns, practices, and reference architectures.
• Strengthen the organization's security posture by implementing and enhancing controls to address gaps and vulnerabilities identified through audits, assessments, red team, penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, and proactive threat modeling.
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• Own the reliability, resiliency, and operational excellence of authentication services by defining and achieving SLOs, improving service availability and performance, instrumenting and enhancing observability, and leading incident response efforts to reduce MTTR.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and industry trends, establish engineering standards and best practices, and provide technical leadership across authentication domains.

Essential Skills

• 10+ years of Information Technology or Engineering experience with authentication, identity or security engineering accountabilities.
• 4+ years management experience.
• Experience leading enterprise large-scale projects.

Technical Skills

• Strong technical expertise and enterprise experience with majority of the following:
• Strong knowledge of authentication protocols (SAML, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, Kerberos, LDAP, certificate based authentication, etc.).
• Experience implementing on-prem and cloud authentication solutions (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Strong Expertise with Active Directory and Entra ID
• Experience with multifactor solutions (Microsoft Authenticator, Duo, etc.)
• Experience with hardware tokens/smart cards for TOTP, FIDO2, PIV (Duo, Thales, Yubikey, etc.)
• Experience with Privileged Access Management and Vaulting solutions (CyberArk, Hashicorp, Azure Key Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secrets Manager, etc.)
• Experience with PKI solutions such as Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS); Hashicorp, Entrust, Sectigo, DigiCert, etc.
• Experience with automation of authentication solutions and processes
• Experience automated deployments deploying configurations leveraging CI/CD pipelines utilizing technologies like GitHub, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Teraform, Ansible, etc
• Scripting experience (PowerShell, Python, etc.)

Desired Skills

• Understanding of authentication attack techniques, threat actors, and exploitation methods and controls to mitigate.
• Understanding security standards and compliance requirements (NIST, ISO, PCI, HIPPA, Sox, etc.).
• Understanding of Full Stack Java development.

Supervisory Responsibilities

• This role does not have supervisory responsibilities.

Primary Skills

Access Management, Access Management, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Artificial Intelligence Techniques, Authentication, Authentication Protocols, Automated Deployments, AWS Secrets Manager, Certificate Services, Computer Science, Design, Enterprise SSO, GitHub, GitHub Actions, Information Technology Management, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Infrastructure As Code (IaC), Infrastructure Engineering, IT Security Operations, Just-in-Time (JIT) Manufacturing, Just in Time (JIT) Production, Kerberos, LDAP Authentication, Microsoft PowerShell, OAuth {+ 20 more}