IT Systems Engineer

Merge Labs • San Francisco, CA

14h • Hybrid

About The Position

Merge Labs is a frontier research lab with the mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency and experience. We’re pursuing this goal by developing fundamentally new approaches to brain-computer interfaces that interact with the brain at high bandwidth, integrate with advanced AI, and are ultimately safe and accessible for anyone to use.

About the team
Every breakthrough at Merge Labs rides on technology that just works — laptops that boot, credentials that authenticate, networks that hold, systems that talk to each other. Our IT team builds and operates that foundation. The IT team designs identity and access, manages endpoints and SaaS tools, architects secure networks across offices and labs, and partners closely with security, legal, operations, and every technical and scientific discipline to keep sensitive research protected without slowing the team down. The best IT organization is one you rarely have to think about; we invest in speed, security, and polish in equal measure, because the people doing the hard science and engineering deserve infrastructure that compounds everything they build.

About the role:
As our first full-time IT hire, you will own workflows and systems across identity, endpoints, and networks. You will own Okta, Active Directory, the SaaS stack, onboarding and offboarding, vendor relationships, networking, and the day-to-day support that lets a rapidly scaling biotech team operate. You'll be sole in-house IT, collaborating deeply with our infrastructure and operations leads. The job covers Mac, Windows, and a lab environment with on-prem complexity (Proxmox, TrueNAS, AD-joined Linux servers). This is a generalist role with unusual depth.

Requirements

• Demonstrated success in an IT operations or systems administration role, ideally as the sole or near-sole IT owner at a highly scaling startup.
• Hands-on Active Directory administration experience. Group policy, joins, permissions.
• Strong Mac and Windows support fundamentals, including imaging, MDM, and the unglamorous cabling-and-peripherals work.
• Working knowledge of Okta (or a comparable IdP) at the admin level: SSO, SCIM, group design, conditional access.
• Networking competence: Wi-Fi, VLANs, basic firewall rules, ability to actually troubleshoot a dropped connection rather than escalate it.
• A junior-to-mid level grasp of security best practices, ideally from having reported into or worked closely with a security function.
• Action-oriented agency. You propose solutions instead of forwarding tickets, and you follow up without being chased.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward automation and documenting what you build so the next person doesn't get stuck.
• Strong interpersonal presence — able to represent Merge warmly and professionally from a new hire's very first interaction.

Nice To Haves

• If you're excited about this role but don't meet every qualification, please apply. As we build, we're hiring for complementary strengths to form a high-impact team.

Responsibilities

• Act as admin of record to our most critical systems, building out scalable and auditable processes to ensure smooth operations and reasonable securability.
• Own IT onboarding and offboarding end-to-end. Laptops imaged and shipped on day one, accounts and access provisioned cleanly, departing employees deprovisioned same-day.
• Inherit and document our Okta to Active Directory to TrueNAS + Proxmox stack, then operate and improve it.
• Run support across Mac (primary), Windows (lab systems), and partner with the software and platform teams on Linux where needed.
• Manage SaaS contracts, licenses, renewals, and vendor relationships, and build a centralized source of truth for who has access to what and what it costs.
• Keep the office running: Wi-Fi, networking, peripherals, conference rooms, IoT segmentation, the whole stack.
• Unblock the lab so data collection is never waiting on IT, partnering with platform, lab, and external vendors on hardware integration.
• Establish baseline security hygiene: MFA enforcement, quarterly access reviews, password manager discipline, offboarding rigor.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed