IT Manager

• Starting compensation: $140,000 to $165,000
• Work location: On-site in Cambridge, MA (up to 2 remote days per week for exceptional candidates)

Secure Bio is a nonprofit working to protect the world from catastrophic pandemics. As advances in biotechnology lower the barriers to engineering dangerous pathogens, our mission is to make sure humanity’s detection and response systems are ready in time. We work on some of the most consequential problems in biosecurity: novel pathogen surveillance, AI-enabled biosecurity tooling, and the infrastructure that supports both.

Our two program teams, AI and Detection , are backed by a shared Operations team, and we’re based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Operations exists so that the two program teams can do their best work without the systems around them becoming a distraction. That covers everything from finance and people ops through to the platforms, devices, and security posture the whole organisation runs on. IT and security have been part of that remit informally as we’ve grown, handled thoughtfully by people for whom it’s a secondary responsibility.

This role brings that work under one dedicated owner for the first time.

We’re hiring an IT Manager to own the systems and security foundations the whole organisation runs on, and to bring real, sustained focus to work that has, until now, been distributed across a lot of people’s plates. You’ll report to Alvaro Morales, Director of Operations, and work closely with the security and infrastructure leads across both program teams.

You’ll be joining at a formative moment. Because this role hasn’t existed as a dedicated position before, you’ll have freedom to shape how it operates.

Some of your work will be strategic: shaping our security baseline, guiding decisions that cut across teams, and improving our processes for maintaining our ISO 27001 certification. Some of it will be foundational: making sure devices are secure, platforms are configured well, and incidents get handled calmly. Both matter, and the right person for this role sees why.

A dedicated IT and security function is something Secure Bio has grown into needing. It reflects the organisation’s growth and the increasing complexity of the systems we depend on. The person who takes this role will build the foundations of a function that’s likely to grow with Secure Bio over time.

• You’ll configure and secure the SaaS platforms the whole organisation runs on, including Google Workspace, Slack, Linear, Benchling, 1
  
  Password, and our LLM tooling, so that colleagues across both programs can rely on them without thinking about them.
• You’ll manage our fleet of Mac Books through MDM, endpoint security, and patching, making trade-offs between strong protection and staff productivity, especially for technical colleagues who care about their own setups.
• You’ll own the IT that keeps our offices running:
  WiFi, networking, access control, printers, AV.
• You’ll build backup and disaster recovery that we can actually rely on, with real retention and real restore tests.
• You’ll set the security baseline for the systems you own, and work alongside program staff on the decisions that cross team boundaries, particularly the trade-offs between stronger protection and organisational speed.
• You’ll maintain our ISO 27001 certification and coordinate the pieces of it that touch program infrastructure, so what we have adds up to a coherent whole rather than a collection of parts.
• You’ll partner with technical leaders across our AI and Detection programs to implement IT operations and security best practices, ensuring our systems support ambitious technical work without compromising security.
• You’ll own incident response for the systems you’re responsible for, and coordinate the wider response when an incident spans systems, with authority to take fast protective action on shared systems when the situation calls for it.
• You’ll manage our relationship with the security consultant who supports us on specialized areas that need deeper expertise.

• Incident response…