Senior Manager, Systems Engineering

At Vanta, our mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust. We believe that security should be monitored and verified continuously, and we empower companies to practice better security and prove it with ease. Vanta has a kind and talented team, and while some have prior security experience, many have been successful at Vanta without it. Vanta's Corporate Engineering team is the infrastructure layer that keeps 1,500+ people connected, secure, and moving fast. This role leads the shift from a reactive support function to a platform function the whole company relies on. Corporate Engineering owns the systems, tooling, and access infrastructure Vanta runs on. From identity and device management to AI tooling infrastructure and ITSM, CE makes sure Vanta's people have the right access, the right tools, and the right guardrails on day one and every day after. CE is at an inflection point. The company has scaled quickly, AI tooling is live company-wide, and the team is ready for a leader who sets technical direction, establishes clear ownership, and builds the leadership layer beneath them. As Sr. Manager, Systems Engineering, you will lead a team of experienced engineers, own several of the company's highest-priority platform initiatives, and make CE a function the rest of Vanta builds on rather than routes around. What you’ll do as a Senior Manager, Systems Engineering at Vanta: - Lead, coach, and grow a team of systems engineers and a tech lead. Set clear expectations, hold a high bar, and develop the people who build Vanta's most critical internal systems. - Own joiner, mover, and leaver automation end to end in Okta Workflows, so access is correct on day one, follows people through role changes, and closes completely on departure, including API keys and service credentials. - Build and own device assurance across macOS and Windows, defining OS, browser, and device-state policy ahead of enforcement rather than in response to it. - Rationalize the ITSM estate so self-service works, engineers spend their time on platform work instead of tool administration, and partner teams have a system they trust. - Make Corporate Engineering a governed step in SaaS procurement, with SSO enforced, access reviewed, and no tools discovered months after they went live. - Own the identity, access, and connector infrastructure behind Vanta's company-wide AI stack, including MCP servers and the Vercel platform, in close partnership with our AI and Data teams. - Build the visibility layer that shows how work enters the team and where capacity goes, so priorities are set with data and tradeoffs are legible to partners. - Partner with Security, GRC, Finance, and Engineering to enable rather than gate, building guardrails that make self-service safe instead of controls that slow the company down. How to be successful in this role: - A track record of raising the bar on an inherited team, holding it through sustained one-on-one coaching, and staying steady when the results take more than a quarter to show. - Real appetite for inherited complexity, whether that is an orphaned endpoint program, an unfinished migration, or an over-engineered workflow. Interest in untangling it, not just tolerance for it. - An enablement-first instinct. Your default question is how to make something safe to self-serve, not how to control it. - Enough technical depth to evaluate estimates honestly and tell the difference between genuine risk and reported progress. - Hands-on fluency with AI in enterprise tooling, including deploying or governing AI-assisted automation in platforms such as Okta, Intune, Jamf, Atlassian, or GitHub. - Experience spanning identity, endpoint, ITSM, and procurement, or deep expertise in most of them with a track record of expanding scope. - Comfort operating through influence. Several levers this role depends on, including security policy, procurement, and AI strategy, sit in partner organizations. - 8+ years in IT or systems engineering, includ