Principal Security Architect, Identity Resilience

About AvePoint: 

Beyond Secure. AvePoint is the global leader in data security, governance, and resilience, going beyond traditional solutions to ensure a robust data foundation and enable organizations everywhere to collaborate with confidence. Over 25,000 customers worldwide rely on the AvePoint Confidence Platform to prepare, secure, and optimize their critical data across Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and other collaboration environments. AvePoint’s global channel partner program includes approximately 5,000 managed service providers, value-added resellers, and systems integrators, with our solutions available in more than 100 cloud marketplaces. To learn more, visit www.avepoint.com.

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About the position: 

The Principal Architect for Identity Security will serve as the senior technical authority for the security architecture of AvePoint’s identity resilience initiatives. This role is focused on how enterprise identity providers, identity control planes, privileged access systems, application identities, and hybrid identity environments are secured, trusted, contained, recovered, and validated before, during, and after a disaster or identity compromise. Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID are two of the most important identity platforms for this role, but the scope is broader than any single provider. 

This role is intentionally separate from a platform-specific backup and recovery architect role. Backup and recovery architects may own the core backup, restore, rollback, topology, and source-of-authority architecture for specific platforms. This identity security architect owns the threat model, control-plane security, recovery trust model, incident-response integration points, secure restore guardrails, and post-recovery validation requirements that ensure identity resilience platforms can be trusted in adversarial conditions. 

The ideal candidate has deep hands-on experience securing complex enterprise identity environments, including Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, hybrid identity, privileged access, application and workload identities, federation, identity governance integrations, and identity incident response. They can speak credibly with CISOs, identity architects, incident responders, platform engineers, and product leaders, while translating that expertise into product architecture, security requirements, and customer-facing recovery guidance. 

This is not a generic IAM governance role and not a pure SOC analyst role. The right person understands identity as Tier-0 infrastructure, knows how attackers persist across identity systems, and can design product workflows that help customers prepare, recover, and validate a trusted known-good state after a serious incident. 

Specific responsibilities include, but are not limited to: 

• Own the security architecture for AvePoint’s identity resilience platforms, including threat modeling, recovery trust criteria, privileged-access safeguards, secure restore guardrails, and post-recovery validation workflows across major enterprise identity providers. 

• Partner with platform backup and recovery architects to ensure identity restore, relationship recovery, policy recovery, and source-of-authority workflows operate safely under breach conditions, not just during normal administrative recovery. 

• Define the product’s Tier-0 security model, including least privilege, just-in-time elevation, credential isolation, gMSA usage, privileged access workstation expectations, break-glass handling, secure service accounts, immutable audit trails, and separation of monitoring vs. restore permissions. 

• Design security requirements for protecting the backup control plane: administrator roles, service app permissions, consented permissions, BYOS storage controls, network restrictions, key management, deletion approvals, retention tamper resistance, and recovery-data integrity validation. 

• Define how the product should support pre-breach recovery readiness, including known-good state documentation, critical identity object inventory, break-glass validation guidance, restore permission validation, and out-of-band communications readiness. 

• Architect secure workflows for identity breach recovery phases: trusted control, detection and triage support, user containment handoff, application and workload identity containment handoff, persistence review, environment trust decision gates, known-good restore, downstream workload recovery, and validation. 

• Translate identity attack and persistence patterns into product requirements, including malicious application registrations, service-principal credential abuse, illicit consent grants, access-policy tampering, privileged role assignment changes, risky federation or trust changes, guest-user persistence, and group membership abuse. 

• Define containment handoff requirements for identity security teams, including when the product should guide or warn customers about token/session revocation, password reset sequencing, service-principal credential rotation, app disablement, admin-consent review, and emergency Conditional Access controls. 

• Design safe Conditional Access recovery patterns, including dependency validation, break-glass account protection, policy state handling, restore-as-disabled/report-only options where supported, and approval checkpoints before re-enabling high-impact policies. 

• Design security requirements for application recovery, including generated app secrets, new key IDs, API permission re-consent, Enterprise Application permission caveats, SSO/provisioning validation, credential rotation workflows, and secure reporting of secrets or remediation tasks. 

• Define how the product should compare current state against known-good backups without overclaiming detection: post-recovery-point objects, changed privileged assignments, changed app credentials, modified CA policies, changed Named Locations, and changed memberships. 

• Own the security validation model after restore: critical object validation, privileged access validation, app/service-principal validation, CA dependency validation, break-glass access validation, manual remediation checklists, and evidence/reporting for security, audit, and compliance teams. 

• Contribute deep expertise where identity platforms require specialized recovery security guidance, including Active Directory forest/domain trust risk, domain controller trust boundaries, krbtgt and privileged credential handling, AD CS and certificate abuse considerations, SYSVOL/GPO integrity, DNS trust assumptions, and safe sequencing during forest recovery. 

• Partner with Product, Engineering, Architecture, Security, and Field teams to convert security and recovery requirements into epics, design reviews, acceptance criteria, test plans, and customer-facing recovery guidance. 

• Conduct cus