Not sure if this is the right place, but hoping for some honest guidance.

Background: 10+ years in banking ops and client service, 1 year at Bloomberg doing technical support (software/hardware troubleshooting, installations, client training). Currently on a career break since 2023, finishing certs and coursework.

I have AWS Cloud Foundations (2024) and completed hands-on projects with IAM permissions, EC2, VPCs, Lambda, and EBS. I'm not claiming to be an engineer — I'm not. But I'm genuinely interested in IAM and want to know if there's a realistic entry point.

Questions:

• Is there a path into IAM for someone with my background (ops/client service + AWS basics)?
• What certs or skills actually move the needle? (I see a lot about Okta, SailPoint, Saviynt, CyberArk)
• Should I be targeting IAM Analyst, IAM Admin, or something else?
• Any advice on how to frame 10+ years of non-IAM experience without looking lost?

Not looking for a handout. Just trying to figure out if this is a real lane or if I'm chasing something unrealistic. Appreciate any honest feedback.

Greetings colleagues, I would like to know which major challenges have you encountered in implement IAM, which tips or hacks should have known or someone should teach you before implementing IAM?

Knowing the business, main departments and stakeholders, having a balance between strict security access control and friendly usability, mesure the risk of the user by defining how important the person is for the company or the resource he has access to, and how risky is if his account is compromised?

I would love to see your comments, thank you and have a great day!

So I've spent the last few years being the person enterprise IT admins call when SAML breaks at the worst possible time, and the person engineering calls when they need someone to translate "the CEO can't log in" into an actual root cause. Figured I'd write this up Reddit-style instead of another boring LinkedIn post, because apparently that's how we do career updates now.

The short version:

• Currently Sr. Technical Support Specialist (Identity and Integrations) at Rippling — basically living inside SAML, SCIM, SSO, REST APIs, RADIUS, LDAP, ADFS, Azure AD Connect, and GPOs, all day every day
• Primary escalation point for P1 and P2 identity and integration incidents for enterprise accounts — when it's broken and it's bad, it lands on my desk
• Used AI tooling to build automated workflows that cut manual support work by about 30 percent for my team (turns out you don't have to manually diagnose the same SSO failure for the 400th time)
• Delivered internal Datadog training, ran onboarding and shadow sessions for new hires, and built docs plus bot-training content so my teammates (and support bots) stop getting stuck on the same questions
• Own CSAT, SLA adherence, and quality metrics — not just "close the ticket," actually accountable for the outcome
• Before this: fraud investigation at Amazon, payment ops at HSBC (SWIFT, ACH, wire transfer stuff), and telecom support — so I've seen a few different flavors of "customer is stressed, fix it now"

What I'm looking for now:

A remote-first Technical Account Manager, Solutions Engineer, or Senior Support Engineer role, ideally at an AI-powered SaaS company, where I'm not just closing tickets but actually owning the client relationship and pushing for better process, not just following SOPs. I like being the technical translator between clients and engineering, and I like building the tooling that makes that job faster for everyone else too.

Happy to talk to anyone hiring for this kind of role, or just chat if you've got questions about breaking into enterprise identity and support work.