IT Operations Lead

Atypical
· Remote (US)
· Part-time contractor (20–30 hrs/week) with path to contract-to-hire or partnership

The traditional MSP model — bundle software licenses, mark them up, throw junior techs at ticket queues, scale by adding bodies — is starting to break. AI is absorbing the repeatable tier-1 and tier-2 work that justified that headcount. License markups are getting harder to defend as clients want to own their tooling. And the PE rollup wave has produced MSPs that are optimizing for margin in ways their clients can feel.

What we think replaces it: boutique, senior-heavy IT firms operating as fractional IT teams, using AI to handle the repeatable work and putting senior judgment on the rest. Smaller books per firm. Higher trust per relationship. No license arbitrage. No tiered service desks where the client's problem ricochets through three queues before it lands on someone qualified.

That's Atypical. We serve startups and modern SMBs as their IT and security team — not as a vendor pitching upsells, but as the operators who actually run the function. Clients own their tooling. We bring the engineering, the operations, and the judgment.

We're not the only firm pointing at this shift, and we don't think we have it fully figured out. But we're building accordingly, and we're looking for someone to build it with us.

Honest snapshot:
Atypical has real clients, real revenue, and a clear thesis. It also has a founder who's still doing too much of the day-to-day operations himself, which is the bottleneck on growth.

This hire exists to change that. The goal is to move from reactive (founder firefighting across clients) to proactive (an operator owning the function, founder focused on deepening client relationships and building the business). The systems and tooling exist in working form; they need someone to run them, document them, refine them, and make them genuinely scalable.

If you want to step into a polished, fully-built operation, this isn't it. If you want to take ownership of a function that's already working but needs a real operator behind it, that's the role.

You will own IT operations and the service desk for Atypical's client portfolio. When a client has an access request, a device issue, a patching gap, or an audit deadline, you're the person who makes sure it's handled — well, on time, and documented.

You'll be equipped with Serval to automate tier-1 support and routine workflows. Your job isn't ticket-pushing. It's designing the systems, tuning the automation, handling what doesn't automate cleanly, and making sure nothing falls through the cracks. The AI does the volume; you bring the judgment.

This is a part-time contractor role: roughly 20–30 hours per week to start, with day-to-day flexibility. If we work well together and grow the business, there's a real path to contract-to-hire or a partnership stake.

We've tried to fill this role before with people who had partial experience — strong at support, or strong at junior systems work, but not the full breadth. It hasn't worked. The role demands someone who can move fluidly across the entire IT and security stack and exercise senior judgment about what matters.

We're not looking for someone with potential. We're looking for someone who has already done this kind of work and is ready to run it for us.

Concretely, you should be the kind of operator who can:

• Audit a client's environment across MDM, identity, endpoint security, network, and SaaS, and tell us what's broken and what to fix first
• Diagnose an issue that touches three systems at once without flinching
• Read between the lines of an ambiguous client request and know which clarifying question actually matters
• Decide…