Staff IT Systems Engineer, Identity

Your Impact at LILA

Lila is hiring a Staff IT Systems Engineer, Identity to own the architecture and roadmap for identity and access management across the company. This is a senior individual-contributor role with company-wide scope, focused on how employees, services, and AI agents authenticate, receive access, and operate securely.

You’ll join the IT & Security team and partner closely with Security, People, Engineering, and Lab Operations. You’ll modernize Lila’s identity foundation across cloud IAM, SSO, SaaS administration, machine identity, and identity governance while mentoring engineers and raising the bar for identity engineering practice.

This role is especially important as Lila scales its workforce, physical footprint, autonomous labs, and AI-native operating model. The right person will make identity systems more secure, automated, auditable, and easier for employees to use.

What You'll Be Building

• Own the architecture and roadmap for Lila’s identity platform across Okta, Entra ID, AWS IAM, GCP IAM, SSO, and directory services.
• Drive Lila’s Zero Trust roadmap, including phishing-resistant MFA, continuous access evaluation, device trust, and endpoint integration.
• Build a machine identity and AI-agent identity program for service accounts, API keys, workload identities, OAuth/OIDC grants, MCP servers, and autonomous lab systems.
• Design identity governance capabilities, including access certification, entitlement reviews, and automated joiner, mover, and leaver workflows.
• Set standards for SaaS identity integrations across Google Workspace, Slack, Atlassian, Microsoft 365, and the broader application portfolio.
• Build production-grade automation using Python or Go, Terraform, workflow platforms, and AI-assisted engineering tools.
• Partner with Security on identity threat modeling, incident response, access audits, and compliance readiness.
• Serve as the technical escalation point for complex identity issues and mentor engineers across IT and Security.
• Document architecture decisions, processes, and runbooks that improve identity operations at scale.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• Deep experience in IT systems engineering, infrastructure, or identity engineering, with significant ownership of identity and access management systems.
• Strong Okta experience, including SSO, SAML, OIDC, SCIM, authorization policies, and workflow automation.
• Experience designing and scaling IAM, Zero Trust, or identity governance programs in a complex technical environment.
• Strong understanding of cloud IAM concepts across providers such as AWS, GCP, Entra ID, or similar platforms.
• Ability to build and operate automation using Python or Go, APIs, event-driven workflows, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Working knowledge of machine identity concepts, including workload identity federation, secrets management, and service account governance.
• Strong technical judgment, troubleshooting ability, and written communication skills.
• Track record mentoring engineers and leading cross-functional technical initiatives without relying on formal authority.

Bonus Points For

• Experience in biotech, pharma, life sciences, R&D, or another regulated technical environment.
• Familiarity with SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GxP, or similar compliance frameworks.
• Experience securing lab instrumentation, robotics, IoT, scientific computing, or autonomous systems.
• Experience designing or operating identity systems for AI agents or agentic workflows.
• Experience with endpoint management or MDM platforms such as Jamf, JumpCloud, or Kandji.
• Experience building Slack apps, Slackbots, internal developer tooling, or identity self-service workflows.
• Experience supporting M&A integration or rapid headcount scaling from an identity perspective.