Director of Information Technology

TRIO Electric•Houston, TX

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

TRIO Electric is a leading Texas electrical design, construction, and service firm serving commercial and light-industrial customers. Our teams deliver complex projects through professional engineering, BIM coordination, prefabrication, experienced field leadership, and 24/7 emergency service. Technology at TRIO must work where the business works. Reliability, responsive support, sound cost decisions, and respect for field workflows matter as much as long-term strategy. TRIO is seeking an IT Director who can stabilize and strengthen the current environment while building a practical path forward. This is not a strategy-only position. You will remain close to network, server, endpoint, application, and support operations; lead one IT team member; and decide what should be handled internally, automated, or supported by outside partners. The immediate mandate is clear: improve network and server reliability, establish disciplined preventive maintenance, create visibility into technology risk and spend, and make support sustainable for a lean team. Over time, you will guide modernization of business systems, data and reporting, device management, integrations, cloud services, and responsible AI.

Requirements

Seven or more years of progressive IT experience, including ownership of infrastructure and operations and leadership of at least a small team.
Hands-on breadth across networks, servers, backups, endpoints, identity, Microsoft 365, and security operations.
Demonstrated ability to assess an inherited environment, prioritize by business risk, and improve reliability with limited internal resources.
Experience managing vendors, reviewing contracts, benchmarking services, negotiating commercial terms, and holding partners accountable.
Experience evaluating on-premises and cloud options, legacy applications, data/reporting environments, and integration tradeoffs.
Strong written and verbal communication with executives, technical partners, office employees, and field-based teams.
Sound judgment, composure, follow-through, and willingness to remain hands-on in a lean operating environment.

Nice To Haves

Experience in construction, skilled trades, industrial services, or another distributed, field-based business.
Experience with a construction ERP; SQL-based reporting; ETL, middleware, or structured data exports.
Experience deploying MDM and managing leased or rented device lifecycles.
Experience establishing AI, automation, or emerging-technology governance and moving useful pilots into supported operations.
A record of improving vendor economics, service levels, or contract protections with measurable results.

Responsibilities

Assess and document the network, server, backup, endpoint, identity, and Microsoft 365 environments, including hardware age, support status, monitoring gaps, incident history, patch posture, and single points of failure.
Establish preventive-maintenance routines, alerting, patch and backup verification, maintenance windows, recovery testing, and usable runbooks that reduce avoidable downtime.
Translate technical findings into a prioritized, business-risk view for the CFO and COO, with clear owners, costs, target dates, and expected impact.
Own incident response and service continuity while defining appropriate reliability and response-time targets for internal staff and vendors.
Evaluate whether network and server support should be strengthened in-house, added to the current cybersecurity provider’s scope, or sourced elsewhere—then manage the selected model to measurable outcomes.
Lead an IT function supporting approximately 200–250 employees across office, shop, and field environments. Organic growth and M&A focused scale.
Create practical service priorities and response expectations so business-critical issues are handled quickly while protected time remains available for projects and preventive work.
Reduce repetitive support demand through automation, self-service, standards, documentation, and selective outsourcing.
Coach and develop the IT team member, clarify ownership, and model calm, respectful support—especially when users are under field or project pressure.
Own Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Intune, endpoint security, access governance, and related core platforms.
Evaluate a homegrown SQL-based productivity reporting environment with hundreds of tables and millions of rows. Assess data quality, business criticality, maintainability, security, technical debt, and total cost before recommending whether to stabilize, improve, rebuild, or replace it.
Develop a phased, multi-quarter path for legacy reporting and data improvements; avoid unnecessary disruption to tools the business depends on.
Assess integration needs around ComputerEase and other business applications. Use realistic options such as scheduled exports, import routines, ETL or middleware, and retain manual processes when integration value does not justify the cost or complexity.
Evaluate cloud opportunities based on resilience, operating effort, security, and total cost.
Select and roll out a fit-for-purpose MDM approach for approximately 50–80 iPads and 40–50 rented laptops, including enrollment, configuration, security baselines, application deployment, inventory, and support.
Create repeatable onboarding, reassignment, offboarding, secure-wipe, return-condition, and vendor-coordination processes for rented equipment.
Plan device refresh cycles and related costs proactively, with clear inventory and forecast visibility for leadership.
Own technology vendor performance, renewals, contracts, licensing, and spending, including approximately $150,000 in annual network infrastructure expense.
Audit actual usage and business need, benchmark pricing and service levels, obtain competitive options, and negotiate for lower total cost, stronger terms, and accountable performance.
Maintain constructive vendor relationships while addressing service gaps directly and documenting commitments, escalation paths, response times, and reliability expectations.
Serve as the primary technology advisor to the CFO, COO, and operating leaders, presenting choices in terms of business impact, risk, cost, and timing.
Challenge decisions constructively when needed: bring evidence, explain tradeoffs, document recommendations and accepted risk, and support the final business decision without ego.
Build a sequenced IT roadmap grounded in current operational needs, team capacity, and return on investment rather than over-scoping long-range transformation.