Athene manages over $430 billion in assets as the largest individual annuity provider in the United States, operating a portfolio spanning fixed indexed annuities, registered index-linked annuities (RILAs), and pension risk transfer solutions for institutional clients. Founded in 2009 and partnered with Apollo Global Management, the company built its position on alternative asset management strategies designed to generate returns that fund guaranteed lifetime income products for retail customers and handle pension liability transfers for corporations looking to offload retirement obligations.
The threat surface is what you'd expect from a financial services operation at this scale: customer PII across millions of retail accounts, institutional client data from pension transfers, and the investment management infrastructure that ties it all together. The tech stack visible from job postings includes ServiceNow and Microsoft Office, suggesting a traditional enterprise environment rather than a cloud-native build. The company holds A+ ratings from AM Best, S&P, and Fitch - credentials that require documented operational and financial controls, which translates to compliance-heavy security postures and regular auditor scrutiny.
Security and IT teams here are operating in a dual context: protecting retail customer data under state insurance regulations while managing institutional relationships that come with their own contractual security requirements. The alternative asset management piece - Apollo's domain - adds complexity around investment data classification and access controls. For security practitioners, this means navigating insurance industry frameworks, financial services compliance regimes, and the operational reality of securing legacy systems that can't easily be ripped out in a sector where uptime and data integrity directly impact policyholder guarantees.