The Manager Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM) role is a senior individual contributor position with primary accountability for CIAM strategy, governance, architectural and capability direction, supported by strong technical depth. The role is responsible for shaping how customer identity solutions are planned, governed, and evolved to meet business priorities, regulatory expectations, and industry trends.
This role partners closely with business, digital, product, and technology leaders to understand customer and business needs, translate them into CIAM capabilities, and ensure those capabilities are delivered in a secure, compliant, and scalable manner. While the role provides architectural guidance and technical oversight, it is intentionally weighted toward strategic planning, prioritization, and governance, rather than hands-on engineering or day-to-day operations. However, the role does require technical fluency to evaluate solution designs, estimate technical effort, recommend approaches, and make platform-level technical decisions. Major platform decisions and enterprise-impacting risks are surfaced to IAM /Cyber leadership for alignment.
The core parts of your role would be to:
- Define and maintain the CIAM strategy and multi-year roadmap aligned with business growth, digital transformation, and enterprise security objectives.
- Continuously assess business priorities, customer experience needs, regulatory drivers, and industry trends to shape CIAM capability evolution.
- Regularly re-prioritize CIAM initiatives based on changing business needs, risk posture, and market developments.
- Act as a trusted advisor to IAM leadership and senior stakeholders on CIAM investments, trade-offs, and sequencing.
- Establish and evolve measurable outcomes for the CIAM roadmap
- Partner with business, product, and digital teams to understand customer journeys, growth objectives, and pain points
- Translate business requirements into clear CIAM capability requirements, outcomes, and success measures.
- Facilitate alignment between business expectations and security, privacy, and technology constraints.
- Communicate CIAM strategy, direction, and decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Drive alignment with architecture and wider cyber security stakeholders on platform-level patterns, risk trade-offs, and decision points.
- Establish clear engagement paths and working rhythms with product teams to inform CIAM roadmap, onboarding sequencing, and platform adoption.
- Define, maintain and drive CIAM governance frameworks, standards, and guardrails covering customer authentication, authorization, identity lifecycle, and consent.
- Define and maintain platform release and feature enablement governance.
- Ensure CIAM solutions align with security, privacy, and regulatory requirements through strong design governance and oversight.
- Support audits, risk assessments, and regulatory engagements by providing CIAM domain expertise and direction.
- Establish and operate clear decision-making forums and processes for CIAM-related priorities and changes.
- Own the strategic direction for CIAM platforms and tooling, including roadmap planning and capability evolution.
- Leverage experience with Auth0, Okta, and similar customer authentication platforms to guide platform usage and optimization.
- Assess new and emerging customer authentication and CIAM tools, patterns, and services, recommending adoption where appropriate.
- Partner with vendors and internal teams to ensure platforms are used effectively and aligned to long-term strategy.
- Provide high-level architectural guidance and design oversight for CIAM implementations.
- Provide platform-level technical leadership for CIAM, with the ability to understand implementations at engineering depth without performing hands-on coding.
- Evaluate and recommend technical approaches across authentication, authorization, session/token models, tenant separation, federation, and M2M patterns.
- Estimate and size CIAM technical work (effort, complexity, sequencing, and delivery risk) to support roadmap planning and prioritization.
- Review solution designs to ensure alignment with CIAM standards, security expectations, and strategic direction.
- Review solution designs to ensure alignment with CIAM standards, security expectations, and approved platform patterns; challenge designs where needed.
- Act as an escalation point for complex design decisions, highlighting potential risks without owning detailed engineering implementation.
- Provide strategic oversight for CIAM initiatives to ensure outcomes align with roadmap, priorities, and governance expectations.
- Support prioritization decisions across initiatives when capacity or dependencies shift.
- Partner with operations teams to ensure CIAM services meet agreed availability and reliability expectations, without owning day-to-day operations.
CIAM Strategy & Roadmap Ownership
Business & Stakeholder Engagement
Governance, Risk & Standards
Platform & Vendor Strategy
Architecture & Technical Oversight (Lightweight)
Delivery Alignment & Operational Oversight (Limited)
Let's Talk About You!
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.
- Master’s degree (MBA, MSc, or equivalent) is an asset.
- 7-8+ years of experience in IAM or security domains, with a strong focus (3+ years) in Customer IAM (CIAM).
- Demonstrated experience leading CIAM strategy, governance, or platform direction in a customer-facing environment.
- Proven ability to work closely with business and product stakeholders to deliver identity capabilities aligned to business outcomes.
- Strong working knowledge of CIAM concepts including customer authentication, federation, authorization, identity lifecycle, and consent.
- Hands-on experience with Auth0 and Okta, and the ability to quickly assess and adopt new customer authentication tools and services.
- Solid understanding of industry standards and protocols (e.g., OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML).
- Strong ability to reason CIAM solutions at engineering depth (configuration, integration patterns etc.)
- Proven capability to estimate technical effort and delivery complexity for IAM initiatives,
- Experience making and defending technical trade-off decisions in collaboration with architects, engineers, and vendors.
- Proven ability to assess industry trends, emerging threats, and technology shifts to inform CIAM strategy.
- Strong prioritization and decision-making skills in dynamic environments.
- Ability to balance customer experience, security, regulatory requirements, and delivery constraints.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Ability to clearly articulate CIAM strategy, risks, and trade-offs to senior business and technology leaders.
- Proven ability to influence outcomes across cross-functional teams without direct authority.
Relevant certifications such as CISSP, CISM, CCSP, or CIAM / vendor-specific certifications.
Education
Experience
CIAM & Platform Expertise
Strategic & Analytical Skills
Communication & Influence
Certifications (Asset)
Skills Required
- 7-8+ years of experience in IAM or security domains, with a strong focus (3+ years) in Customer IAM (CIAM)
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field
- Strong working knowledge of CIAM concepts including customer authentication, federation, authorization, identity lifecycle, and consent
- Hands-on experience with Auth0 and Okta
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
What We Do
MakeBank on everyday banking: Earn high interest on every dollar Say no to fees No minimum balances Powered by Equitable Bank, a Schedule I Canadian Bank EQB Inc. (formerly Equitable Group Inc.) trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: EQB and EQB.PR.C), directly serves over 607,000 Canadians through its wholly owned subsidiary Equitable Bank, Canada's Challenger Bank™, and serves over 200 Canadian credit unions that serve over 6 million of their members with products and services. Equitable Bank has grown to become Canada's 7th largest independent Schedule I bank with over a $119 billion in assets under management and assets under administration, and a clear mandate to drive real change in Canadian banking to enrich people's lives. At Equitable Bank, we are as invested in our employees as we are in our business. That’s why we are consistently recognized as one of Canada's Top Employers – a rating that comes from our 1,800 employees. Equitable Bank’s inclusive, welcoming, and pride-inducing workplace earned it the honour of being recognized as one of the top 50 organizations on the 2023 list of Canada’s Best Workplaces™. Founded over 50 years ago, Equitable Bank provides diversified personal and commercial banking, and through its EQ Bank platform (eqbank.ca), which has been named #1 Bank in Canada for three consecutive years on the Forbes World's Best Banks list for 2021, 2022, and 2023. Equitable Bank website: www.equitablebank.ca EQ Bank website: www.eqbank.ca Specialties Lending, Mortgages, Residential Lending, Commercial Lending, Reverse mortgages, Insurance lending, Equipment leasing , Credit Union, Trust, and Funds Management
