IAM / Identity Engineer
IAM (Identity and Access Management) Engineers specialize in the protocols and systems that control who can access what. Their daily work includes implementing identity provider integrations, writing access governance policies, auditing group memberships, and presenting access risk reports to security leadership. This path builds the precise vocabulary for discussing federation, trust models, and least-privilege design in English.
Topics covered
- OAuth 2.0 & OIDC
- SAML federation
- RBAC & ABAC
- Directory services
- PAM & JIT access
- Identity governance
Vocabulary spotlight
4 terms every IAM / Identity Engineer should know in English:
An arrangement that allows users to authenticate using credentials from one trusted identity provider (IdP) to access resources managed by another service provider (SP)
"We set up SAML federation between our corporate IdP and the SaaS vendor, eliminating the need for separate credentials."
Role-Based Access Control — a model that assigns permissions to roles rather than individuals, so access is managed by assigning users to roles
"RBAC made it easy to provision new developers — we just added them to the contributor role."
Just-In-Time access — elevated privileges granted on demand for a limited time window rather than permanently assigned
"We replaced standing admin access with JIT access to reduce the blast radius of a compromised account."
A specific permission or right granted to a user or role — the set of entitlements defines what resources a principal can access and what actions they can perform
"The access review flagged 15 users with entitlements they hadn't used in 90 days."
📚 Vocabulary Reference
Key terms organised by category for IAM / Identity Engineers:
Protocols
Access Models
Identity Concepts
PAM & Governance
Recommended exercises
Real-world scenarios you'll practise
- Presenting an access governance quarterly review to the CISO: summarising over-privileged accounts and remediation progress
- Writing an IAM policy decision record: documenting why you chose ABAC over RBAC for a multi-tenant service
- Explaining federation setup to a SaaS vendor: walking through the SAML metadata exchange and SP configuration
- Preparing a JIT access proposal: justifying the migration from standing admin access to ephemeral elevation