IT Manager | Full-Time | Ryan Field at Northwestern University

Oak View Group

Oak View Group (OVG) is the global leader in premium live entertainment infrastructure and services, with a platform spanning venue development and end-to-end capabilities across venue management, hospitality, and sponsorship sales. Founded in 2015, the company serves a collection of seven world-class owned venues and a client roster of the most iconic arenas, stadiums, convention centers, music festivals, performing arts centers, and cultural institutions, spanning four continents.

Position Summary

The IT Manager is responsible for the day-to-day reliability, support, and maintenance of technology infrastructure at New Ryan Field and Welsh-Ryan Arena. Reporting to the Director of Venue Technology, this position serves as a senior, hands-on technical resource, providing Tier II support while independently troubleshooting and resolving Tier III-level network, systems, and infrastructure issues. A primary responsibility of this position is ensuring that all venue technology endpoints-including point-of-sale terminals, ticket scanners, cameras, wireless access points, digital signage, access-control devices, and other connected systems-remain operational and event-ready at all times.

The IT Manager supports venue business operations, event production, ticketing, point-of-sale, security, broadcast, audiovisual, building systems, and other event-critical technologies. This role requires a proactive team player who can collaborate effectively with OVG Corporate IT, Northwestern University Information Technology when applicable, venue partners, vendors, tenants, promoters, and event personnel. This is a 100% on-site, field-based position. The majority of each workday will be spent throughout the venues inspecting systems, resolving issues, testing endpoints, supporting users, and proactively identifying technology concerns.

Availability for evenings, weekends, holidays, and extended hours is required based on the event schedule.

This role pays a yearly salary of $90,000 - $100,000

Benefits for Full-Time role:
Health, Dental and Vision insurance, 401(k) savings plan, 401(k) matching, and paid time off (vacation days, sick days, and 11 holidays).

This position will remain open until October 2, 2026.

About the Venue

The new Ryan Field is a new 35,000-seat football stadium designed to be the premier venue of its size in America for college sports, concerts, and other live events.

Welsh-Ryan Arena is a 6,500-seat multipurpose arena located on the campus of Northwestern University and home to Northwestern basketball, volleyball, wrestling, and other university and community events.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary on-site escalation resource for complex IT, network, systems, and infrastructure issues.
• Provide advanced Tier II support with the ability to independently diagnose and resolve Tier III-level incidents.
• Ensure venue endpoints are connected, functional, properly configured, and ready for daily operations and live events.
• Conduct routine field inspections and testing of point-of-sale terminals, ticket scanners, cameras, access points, IPTV devices, access-control systems, digital signage, and other network-connected equipment.
• Support and maintain the Cisco network environment, including switches, routers, wireless infrastructure, VLANs, access ports, network closets, and related platforms.
• Troubleshoot LAN, WAN, WLAN, VPN, DHCP, DNS, TCP/IP, routing, switching, authentication, and connectivity issues.
• Monitor network and system performance and proactively address potential service interruptions.
• Provide technical leadership and event-day support for football games, basketball games, concerts, and other live events.
• Respond quickly to issues affecting ticketing, point-of-sale, credentialing, Wi-Fi, broadcast, audiovisual, IPTV, security, digital signage, and back-of-house operations.
• Exercise sound judgment in determining when issues should be resolved internally and when timely escalation to manufacturers, integrators, service providers, or other third-party support is necessary.
• Support computers, mobile devices, printers, phones, conference rooms, and enterprise applications.
• Maintain network…