Senior IT Manager

About the role

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.

• 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.

• 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. We're more interested in range and adaptability than years.
• 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. It is not just executing tickets.

• Exposure to AWS or cloud infrastructure support.
• Exposure to Dev Ops 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.

These are the concrete outcomes we'd expect early on. You'll drive the decisions and the implementation; on the data pipeline item specifically, you're expected to investigate and recommend, not necessarily build it yourself.

• Evaluate our 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.
• We're currently running both Active Directory and Google Workspace. Investigate whether we can consolidate onto one and bring back a recommendation.
• Move new‑machine setup to scripted, repeatable installs for faster provisioning, and less time spent on manual updates.
• Investigate our instrument data flow for R&D (test data > pilot batch > QA) and current notebook practices (digital and physical), and bring back a recommendation on how to improve traceability and search. You'll partner with whoever ultimately builds this, not necessarily build it solo.
• Propose a LAN/WiFi uptime SLA target and stand up continuous monitoring across both sites (uptime, jitter, device presence) to diagnose recurring connectivity issues — including in the materials lab.
• Audit backup processes for instrument computers and servers, confirm they actually work, and set up a preventive maintenance schedule.

• Not a compliance/security‑program‑ownership role (e.g., SOC
  2). That's out of scope for now and would be…