Senior IT Manager

Job Title: Senior IT Manager

Department: Operations

Job Level: L5

FLSA: Exempt

Bear Robotics is hiring a senior, hands‑on IT leader to own our IT function end‑to‑end. Reporting into Business Operations, this person is the company’s most senior IT authority — accountable for the systems, security, and infrastructure the U.S. business runs on, and for the policies and controls that govern them. Beyond keeping the environment fast, reliable, and secure, this role carries an explicit mandate to mature IT to public‑company‑grade standards: the governance, security, and compliance posture expected of an organization preparing for external audit and IPO readiness.

The successful candidate operates as a player‑coach — comfortable being the only person in the seat today and doing the work directly, while bringing the judgment of an IT leader who can set strategy, author and enforce policy, and build and lead a team as the company scales.

Senior, player‑coach role. For roughly the next 12–24 months, the Senior IT Manager will operate as Bear Robotics’ sole IT professional — owning the work hands‑on — while standing up the strategy, policies, and controls that a growing team will later run. As the function scales, this role is expected to hire, develop, and lead an IT team, with a clear path to a Head of IT / Director of IT mandate.

We are looking for someone who is people‑leadership ready and energized to build, yet fully willing to be an individual contributor today.

• IT Strategy & Leadership: Serve as Bear Robotics’ senior IT authority. Own the IT roadmap, budget, and tooling strategy, aligning technology investment to business growth. Operate as a player‑coach today and, within 12–24 months, define the IT operating model, hire, mentor, and lead a team. Set standards and represent IT to executive leadership.
• IT Governance, Risk & Compliance (Public‑Company Readiness): Author, implement, and enforce the company’s IT policy suite — acceptable use, access control, change management, data classification and retention, incident response, business continuity/disaster recovery, third‑party/vendor risk, asset management, and security awareness. Design and operate IT general controls (ITGCs) to support SOX 404 and external audit readiness, partnering with Finance, Legal, and external auditors on control narratives, evidence, walkthroughs, and remediation.
  
  Drive readiness toward recognized frameworks such as SOC 2 and/or ISO 27001 and applicable data‑privacy obligations.
• Access Governance & Identity: Own identity and access management end‑to‑end: SSO and MFA, role‑based access and least privilege, joiner/mover/leaver provisioning and deprovisioning, periodic user access reviews, and segregation‑of‑duties controls across financially relevant systems (ERP/CRM).
• Information Security: Own the information security program: endpoint security and mobile device management (MDM), vulnerability and patch management, email and SaaS security, logging and monitoring, and security incident response. Champion a least‑privilege, defense‑in‑depth posture and run ongoing security awareness training.
• Systems & SaaS Administration: Own administration, integration, and lifecycle of the core business stack — Google Workspace, Salesforce (CRM), Net Suite (ERP), Jira, and Looker (BI) — plus identity, MDM, and other SaaS applications. Manage licensing, configuration, and optimization, and ensure cloud data storage is safe, secure, and well‑governed.
• Infrastructure & Networking: Maintain and administer networks and related infrastructure (LAN/WAN/VPN), the endpoint fleet, and connectivity across the environment. Monitor for performance, availability, and security, and implement necessary patches, upgrades, and configurations.
• Service Delivery & Incident Management: As the sole responder today, own the support experience: receive, log, prioritize, and resolve requests in a ticketing system within established SLAs, escalating where appropriate. Build the support model, runbooks, and knowledge base that a future team will scale, and manage day‑to‑day IT operations including new‑hire…