You Are

An engineer who moved into leadership without losing the technical depth that got you there. You've been senior long enough to set direction, and you can still follow the implementation when it matters. You're resourceful about how you get there. You know which problems call for a library, which call for a vendor product, and which call for writing the thing yourself, and you've been wrong about that split enough times to have earned opinions about it. You read the spec instead of guessing what it says. You've debugged something at 2am because you wanted to know why it broke, not because anyone asked.

You've shipped systems that other engineers depended on and that you were accountable for when they failed. You've made architecture decisions that turned out badly, watched the consequences play out, and can describe what you'd do differently. You've reviewed enough code to know the difference between a style disagreement and a real problem.

You can explain a hard technical idea to a CISO without condescending or hiding behind jargon, and you can hold your own in a design review with engineers who know more than you do about their piece of it. You'll tell a client no when the thing they asked for is the wrong thing, and you'll have a defensible alternative ready.

You almost certainly haven't done this specific work before. Very few people have, which is most of why it's interesting.

The Work

This Forward Deployed Engineer, Agentic Identity Platform is a technical leadership role. You will not necessarily be writing code day to day, and on many engagements you won't be. What you will do is read it, review it, and make design calls that depend on understanding how the system actually works rather than how it was described in a deck. When a service fails or a design is wrong, you should be able to go look for yourself.

We are not hiring a delivery manager who signs off on technical work. We are hiring someone with real engineering depth who is senior enough to set direction.

Enterprises are deploying AI agents faster than anyone has figured out how to secure them. An agent authenticates to twelve systems, spawns subagents, calls tools on behalf of a user who left the company last month, and holds credentials nobody inventoried. The identity primitives that industry spent twenty years building for humans and service accounts don't cleanly extend to actors that are autonomous, ephemeral, and delegating authority to each other.

We're building the platforms that solve this: agent registries, delegated authorization models, runtime attribution, and policy engines that make decisions in single-digit milliseconds. Some of it ships to Fortune 100 clients. Some of it becomes the reference architecture the industry copies. There's no vendor product to install because in several of these areas the product doesn't exist yet.

You'd be a Forward Deployed Engineer, which means you're in the room with the client while the system runs in their environment. At this level you're the person a client's principal engineers argue with, and the person who decides what we build versus what we buy.

Specifically:

• Own the technical design for an engagement, including the decisions you'll be held to when they're wrong
• Stay close enough to the agentic identity stack to review the implementation critically and prototype in it when that's the fastest way to settle a question
• Set the technical direction the engineers on your engagement follow, and review their code
• Reverse-engineer how identity actually works in a client environment, then design what it should be
• Make the build-versus-buy calls and document why, in a form that survives your leaving the project
• Prototype against emerging standards and vendor betas, often before documentation exists
• Build the reference implementations and technical content that become how the practice does this work
• Grow the engineers around you, primarily by working alongside them rather than reviewing from a distance

Most people arrive without the identity background, including people who are strong at all of it now. If you have some of it, tell us. If not, we'll teach you, and you'll learn it faster here than anywhere else because you'll be implementing the specs rather than reading about them.

What We'd Like to See

Optional, and not part of how we evaluate candidates. If you'd like to include a link to code you've written, an open source contribution, a technical writeup, or a design document you authored, we enjoy reading them. If your work is under NDA and you'd rather describe in prose what you built, what was hard about it, and what you'd change, that's equally welcome. Applications without either are considered on exactly the same basis.

Travel may be required for this role. The amount of travel will vary from 0 to 100% depending on business need and client requirements.

Here's What You Need

• Minimum of 8 years of professional experience building and shipping production software
• Hands-on technical work within the last 24 months, counting development, prototyping, code review, or technical design review
• Minimum of 4 years of professional development in at least one of Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, Java, or C++
• Minimum of 4 years designing and building concurrent or distributed systems that ran in production
• Minimum of 3 years of hands-on experience deploying and operating cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure, or GCP, including containers and CI/CD pipelines
• Minimum of 2 years of technical leadership of at least 2 engineers, including code review and design review responsibility
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science (or equivalent) OR (minimum 12 years) work experience. (If Associate's Degree, must have minimum 6 years work experience)

Professional Skills Requirements

• At least 2 production systems you owned end to end, covering design, implementation, deployment, and ongoing operation

Bonus points if you have

• Experience with OAuth 2.0, OIDC, token exchange, SAML, SPIFFE, PKI, or mTLS
• Experience with MCP, agent frameworks, or LLM application development
• Experience in identity and access management, IGA, PAM, secrets management, or non-human identity
• Applied cryptography experience, including enough to know what you don't know
• Participation in a production on-call rotation
• Client-facing or consulting experience, including work with executive stakeholders
• Experience making and documenting build-versus-buy decisions
• Ability to explain a hard technical idea to a CISO and hold your own in a design review with engineers who know their piece better than you do

Compensation at Accenture varies depending on a wide array of factors, which may include but are not limited to the specific office location, role, skill set, and level of experience. As required by local law, Accenture provides a reasonable range of compensation for roles that may be hired as set forth below.
We anticipate this job posting will be posted until 11/30/2026.

Accenture offers a market competitive suite of benefits including medical, dental, vision, life, and long-term disability coverage, a 401(k) plan, bonus opportunities, paid holidays, and paid time off. See more information on our benefits here:

U.S. Employee Benefits | Accenture

Role Location Annual Salary Range
California $94,400 to $293,800
Cleveland $87,400 to $235,000
Colorado $94,400 to $253,800
District of Columbia $100,500 to $270,300
Illinois $87,400 to $253,800
Maine $80,400 to $216,200
Maryland $94,400 to $253,800
Massachusetts $94,400 to $270,300
Minnesota $94,400 to $253,800
New York $87,400 to $293,800
New Jersey $100,500 to $293,800
Virginia $87,400 to $270,300
Washington $100,500 to $270,300

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