[Hiring] Principal Security Architect @Oakwood Systems Group Inc.

Role Description

The Principal Security Architect is the hands-on technical and team leader for Oakwood’s Security Solutions Group, delivering customer security projects and helping establish managed-services security offerings. The role leads customer security strategy, architecture, and delivery across Azure, Microsoft 365, and hybrid environments. It translates business goals, risks, and operational needs into architectures and prioritized roadmaps across Cloud Infrastructure, Data & AI, Application Development and agents, Modern Work, and Managed Services.

As a trusted advisor to customer security and technology leaders, the architect owns technical direction and delivery quality, validates designs, and supports implementation, pre-sales, repeatable offerings, and recurring-service maturity. The role integrates security with other practices through their specialists and delivery leaders without assuming their ownership.

Initial priorities are to deliver customer security projects and turn repeatable delivery patterns into managed security offerings with agreed scope, deliverables, pricing inputs, support boundaries, runbooks, and readiness criteria. Work with managed-services and sales leaders to validate these offerings through initial customer engagements and operational handoffs before expanding recurring-service commitments.

The architect leads a small team delivering projects and managed services through coaching, skills development, work allocation, capacity planning, and delivery accountability. Formal personnel duties follow Oakwood’s reporting structure. The role partners with project, service-line, and managed-services leaders on commercial and operational outcomes; it does not independently own a 24×7 SOC or all incident-response coverage.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in cybersecurity, infrastructure, identity, or cloud engineering, including 5+ years designing and delivering Microsoft security solutions and significant architecture leadership.
• Ownership of complex customer security architecture from assessment and design through implementation, validation, and operational transition.
• Small-team technical and people leadership across security projects and managed services, including coaching, resourcing, delivery, service levels, escalations, and operational transitions.
• Deep hands-on expertise in at least two domains—identity and access, Azure/hybrid security, Microsoft 365 security, security operations, or data protection—with architectural breadth across the others.
• Strong knowledge of Entra ID, hybrid Active Directory security, Conditional Access, privileged access, least privilege, and identity lifecycle management.
• Experience with Azure Policy, RBAC, network security, private endpoints, Key Vault, logging, and Defender for Cloud.
• Architectural knowledge of Sentinel/Defender integration, detection engineering, incident workflows, telemetry costs, and security operations, with hands-on depth in core domains.
• Working knowledge of Purview information protection and DLP, Intune compliance, and email and collaboration protection; engage implementation specialists outside core expertise.
• Practical application of Zero Trust, threat modeling, security baselines, and risk-based prioritization.
• Architectural familiarity with AI and agent inventory, ownership, identity/access lifecycle, policies, monitoring, and retirement.
• PowerShell, Kusto Query Language (KQL), and infrastructure-as-code or security automation skills sufficient to validate designs and guide implementation.
• Ability to create architecture documents, recommendations, estimates, plans, and executive presentations; understand scope control, project economics, service effort, and measurable security outcomes.
• Excellent consulting, presentation, whiteboarding, and writing skills; ability to lead multiple workstreams amid ambiguity and change.

Requirements

• Lead discovery, security assessments, architecture workshops, and roadmap discussions to define business goals, threats, constraints, and success criteria.
• Turn findings into current- and target-state architectures, remediation backlogs, roadmaps, estimates, assumptions, dependencies, and risks.
• Track maturity through posture reviews and executive reporting using agreed measures for control adoption and coverage, priority exposures, remediation, agent governance, detection quality, investigation efficiency, operational readiness, and service efficiency.
• Architect cloud and hybrid Zero Trust across identity, privileged access, devices, networks, applications, infrastructure, and data.
• Design identity and network access with Microsoft Entra ID, Conditional Access, MFA, identity governance, Privileged Identity Management, workload and agent identities, and hybrid identity.
• Architect Azure and hybrid security foundations: landing zones, management groups, Azure Policy, RBAC, segmentation, private connectivity, encryption, key management, logging, and Defender for Cloud.
• Design threat protection and security operations with Microsoft Sentinel and Defender, balancing telemetry coverage, ingestion and retention costs, detection quality, investigations, automation, and operational handoff.
• Evaluate and operationalize Microsoft Security Copilot and security agents across Defender, Entra, Intune, and Purview for investigation, triage, posture management, and service efficiency.
• Guide Modern Work security for email, collaboration, external sharing, endpoints, device lifecycle, and data protection using Microsoft Defender, Intune, and Purview.
• Lead security reviews and threat modeling for migrations, applications, APIs, connectors, copilots, and agents.
• Govern enterprise AI and agent lifecycles: discovery, inventory, ownership, onboarding, identity, least privilege, policy enforcement, monitoring, and retirement.
• Partner with Data & AI specialists on permissions, classification, protection, governance, and monitoring for Microsoft Fabric, analytics, and AI data access.
• Map controls to customer policies and frameworks such as NIST, CIS, and ISO 27001.
• Create architecture diagrams, designs, decision records, control mappings, implementation plans, validation criteria, and executive recommendations.
• Lead hands-on delivery: validate designs and configurations, resolve complex issues, review implementation quality, and guide engineering decisions and customer acceptance.
• Coordinate staffing, capacity, workload, and utilization with project and managed-services leaders.
• Oversee project scope, milestones, acceptance, and risks.
• Manage project-to-service transitions through readiness reviews, knowledge transfer, support documentation, monitoring requirements, and clear ownership.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and performance-based bonuses.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Retirement savings plan with company matching.
• Professional development opportunities and training.
• Flexible work arrangements and remote work options.

Company Description

Oakwood Systems Group is a leading IT professional services firm and recognized Microsoft Solutions Partner spanning Application Development, Data & AI, Cloud Infrastructure, Modern Work, and Managed Services. We help organizations modernize and create business value through innovative, scalable, secure Microsoft solutions.