Senior IT Manager

Aether Biomachines•Menlo Park, CA

12d•$85,000 - $110,000•Onsite

About The Position

Aether is bringing IT in-house. You'll be the first dedicated IT hire supporting our ~40 person team across two Bay Area sites. This role will solve existing problems and develop the systems that enable ongoing success and efficiency. This is a hands-on, generalist role for someone who wants ownership and variety. You'll be the person people go to when their laptop stops working, when a lab instrument can’t find the network, but also to provide strategic decisions about services and systems such as device management, security posture, business-process automation and integrations.

Requirements

7+ years of IT experience, ideally including time at a startup (under ~100 people) where you touched a wide range of systems rather than one narrow specialty.
Comfortable with the versatility, prioritization, and interpersonal skills required to be the only IT person on the team (for now).
Excellent judgement in selecting, deploying, configuring and managing key IT tools like MDM, IdP, SSO, AD/SAMBA, RBAC/authorization, LAN/DNS, and mixed-fleet support (Windows, macOS, some Linux) at the right scale for our team and growth.
Understanding of practical networking fundamentals: LANs, WANs, VLANs, addressing/subnets, and WiFi.
Comfort planning and executing IT projects including vendor and contractor coordination, budgeting & approvals, team buy-in and training.

Nice To Haves

Exposure to AWS or cloud infrastructure support.
Exposure to DevOps practices (e.g., version control, SBOM, CI).
Familiarity with business process automation (BPA), coupled with the good sense to only use it when it adds value.
Familiarity with how IT needs change during company audits, certifications, and litigation holds.
Experience with laboratory automation and/or electronic lab notebooks.
Ability to identify, deploy and implement value-add software tools and integrations for a mixed-specialty growing team.

Responsibilities

Help desk support across both sites: hardware, software, and account issues.
Establish and maintain a network SLA, including our lab instruments.
Employee IT onboarding and offboarding: accounts, hardware, and IT asset life-cycle management.
Coordinate with external vendors/contractors on specialized projects (you'll manage the relationship, not necessarily do the work yourself).
Select, deploy and manage business IT systems such as SSO, endpoint security, network/WiFi administration and reliability, data custody/backups, and employee adoption and training for good practices.
Evaluate current endpoint management setup and make a call: expand what's in place or migrate to a proper MDM platform, then start rolling it out.
Start consolidating identity management toward single sign-on, so employees aren't juggling separate logins per machine or system.
Investigate whether we can consolidate onto one (Active Directory and Google Workspace) and bring back a recommendation.
Move new-machine setup to scripted, repeatable installs for faster provisioning, and less time spent on manual updates.
Investigate instrument data flow for R&D and current notebook practices, and bring back a recommendation on how to improve traceability and search.
Propose a LAN/WiFi uptime SLA target and stand up continuous monitoring across both sites to diagnose recurring connectivity issues.
Audit backup processes for instrument computers and servers, confirm they actually work, and set up a preventive maintenance schedule.