Solution Architect - Identity (Auth0 Assessment)

Salary: $150 – $160 per hour

Most organisations that have had an identity platform in place for a few years have never had anyone properly look at it. It goes in, it works well enough, and then capability gets built on top of it year after year without anyone going back to ask whether the original decisions still hold. Collada has been engaged by an Auckland organisation who want to do exactly that with Auth0.

The engagement is an assessment and the output is documentation. They want someone to go through the current implementation and write down what is actually there, what Auth0 can do that they are not using, what has been built in a way that is going to cause them grief as they grow, and what the options are from here. That includes the option of moving off Auth0 if that is where the analysis lands. They have not gone into this with an answer already in mind and they are not looking for an Auth0 evangelist who has one either.

At the end of it you hand over. This is not a role where you assess something and then stay on to build it. You produce the current state picture and the options, with a recommendation, and someone else picks it up from there. If what you want is to see your own design through to delivery, this will frustrate you.

It is also worth saying the six months is not all this one piece of work. There is other identity and identity-adjacent work going on across the organisation and they have said up front that they will point whoever comes in at those initiatives as they come up. Some architects find that a good use of six months, others find it annoying, and it is better to know now.

This sits at Solution Architect level rather than principal or enterprise. It is analyst work as much as architecture. You need to be someone who is happy going deep into a tenant, working out how it has actually been configured rather than how it was meant to be, and then writing it up clearly enough that someone can make a decision off it.

Unfortunately, if you have not worked with Auth0 properly, you are going to struggle here, no matter how strong the rest of your identity background is. A broad IAM career on Entra ID or Okta will not cover it, because the first job is to look at what has been built in Auth0 and say whether it is any good. I would rather say that here than after you have sent a CV.

Role: Solution Architect (Identity)

Location: Auckland

Start Date: TBC

Contract Length: 6 months, full time

Rate: $150ph - $160ph

Flexibility: TBC

Skills: Auth0, Identity and Access Management, CIAM, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML

What you would be doing

• Going through the current Auth0 implementation and documenting what is actually in place

• Forming a clear view on whether it is fit for purpose, and where it will cause problems at scale

• Setting out what the platform can do that they are not currently using

• Defining identity patterns for new capability, and a path for uplifting what already exists

• Laying out the future state options, including alternatives to Auth0 where the analysis supports it

• Handing over cleanly, with documentation someone else can pick up and act on

• Picking up other identity and related initiatives as they are directed to you

What they are looking for

• Genuine Auth0 depth, tenants, actions and rules, custom databases, the parts that go wrong at scale

• Comfortable across OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML and current customer identity patterns

• Enough working knowledge of the alternatives, Entra External ID, Okta, Ping and similar, to make a comparison someone can defend

• Able to assess something another architect built without putting the people who built it offside

• You can write, because the output here is a document someone makes a decision on

• Happy with ambiguity, and happy to be redirected partway through

Collada is a boutique architecture partner. We exist to support leaders in uplifting and delivering architecture capability, typically in highly transformational contexts. We do architecture, we don't do generalist IT recruitment. This is an associate engagement, so you would be engaged by Collada and working on the client's site as part of our associate network, and we stay involved through the engagement rather than making the introduction and disappearing. We also run The Architecture Collective, the architecture community here in New Zealand.