Manager, IT

Description

As a key leader of the Skillable Product & Technology Group, this individual will be responsible for driving standards, compliance, scalability, and business results through internal IT (Information Technology) processes and procedures. This person will manage a small team and be expected to deliver new and improved inter-departmental processes, secure and stable systems, and flexible resources primed to scale a fast-growing remotely based technology company. As the group leader, this person will be expected to create, design, develop, test, and deploy new standard policies and procedures across the company using cross-team collaboration, agile processes, trustworthy roadmaps, and dependable rhythms of communication.  

While this is a leadership role, this person will be expected to “roll up their sleeves” and dive into the work to understand current realities, determine best courses of action, provide the most appropriate direction and guidance, and to develop a trustworthy sense of discernment. A core result of your efforts will be to continuously improve the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the company through core systems and providing clear and trustworthy guidance, in context, to many different types of internal customers.

This role reports to the EVP of Platform Infrastructure and Cloud. This role will work closely with executive team members, peer department leaders, managers, team members, and other leaders in the company in a highly collaborative, agile environment.

The duties of this role fall into the following broad areas: 

• Maintain a strong partnership with Skillable Security and Compliance team members 
• Lead relevant conversations with different departments to understand their challenges and create action plans for overall process improvement. 
• Create and manage projects aimed at ensuring Skillable user accounts and permissions are governed by a standard Role Based Access Control (RBAC) model and tightly managed and controlled in Azure Active Directory 
• Gradually audit and streamline all internal systems settings, policies, and configuration, ensuring they’re aligned with our intentions and policies.
• Gradually audit and streamline all Device registration and device policies, ensuring they’re aligned with our intentions and policies, using tools like Microsoft Intune, Mobile Device Management, and related resources.
• Review and standardize our device deployment processes.
• Continuously drive cloud standards and accountability using Microsoft 365 and Azure.
• Lead the process of migrating distributed Teams file shares to the appropriate SharePoint hub sites and create standards and controls to maintain the new standard.
• Participate in Security Operations Center (SOC) conversations.
• Proactively engage and help improve the security posture of the organization.
• Create and drive a rhythm for proactive communication and trustworthy, centralized reporting on key business processes.
• Enable and implement cross-functional and cross-company support and training where applicable, especially when launching new standards and processes.
• Prepare and deliver presentations to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Oversee processes ensuring internal teams are engaged in responsive, iterative, and collaborative processes to resolve data-related issues/bugs for internal/external customers.

Technical Leadership and team management.

• Proactively learn the business. Clearly understand the challenges our teams have related to data. Earn the right to make informed business and technical decisions related to data.
• Ensure that specification documents meet the required business functionality (documentation for how to deploy, how to troubleshoot, how to use, etc.). 
• Create standards for all activities and processes, build collaborative processes to implement these standards, and own the process of holding departments accountable to the standards.
• Elicit requirements using interviews, document analysis, requirements workshops, surveys, business process descriptions, use cases, business analysis and task & workflow analysis 
• Review, analyze and evaluate business systems, processes, and company needs in a manner that drives appropriate and defensible prioritization decisions.
• Determine how changing business needs will affect current systems and processes (outline current vs future state scenarios for feature sets and user stories)
• Lead your team to identify, analyze, and create non-functional requirements such as system performance, usability, reliability, adaptability, security, legal and other operational aspects.
• Build and manage a trustworthy roadmap and a clear rhythm of communications to executive stakeholders, department leads, and revenue-producers.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, or related field. Master’s degree appreciated and a plus.
• Five (5) years leading IT teams in remote office situations.
• Five (5) years leading and managing technical projects required, including cross-functional workgroup or project team leadership. Proven experience cross-functionally and directly mentoring others.
• Experience documenting complex business requirements and translating them into agile user stories, including experience mentoring team members on these skills, is desired.
• Scrum, Pragmatic and/or Agile certification is highly desired. Experience working within agile frameworks and methodologies is required.
• Successful candidate must be flexible with the ability to adapt in a growing organization while undergoing heavy change (Change Management experience and knowledge is a plus).
• Technical understanding and conversational competence with cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS), virtualization (Hyper-V, VMware), and/or container technology, and RESTful APIs is required. Experience with Learning Management Systems (LMS) and related technologies a plus.
• Desire and ability to work at a fast pace and drive concurrent technical projects is required.
• Experience working in a fully remote team is preferred.
• The position requires excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Must be comfortable working closely with technical and business audiences of all levels.

Working Conditions

The conditions for this position are in a remote home office setting, requiring a space that supports privacy and focus to attend to regular and frequent video and voice calls. Employees in this position will use their computer or phone on an on-going basis throughout the day. Travel is anticipated up to 10% of the time for critical business meetings and industry events.