Phaidra
Director, IT
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About Phaidra
Phaidra is building the future of industrial automation.
The world today is filled with static, monolithic infrastructure. Factories, power plants, buildings, etc. operate the same they've operated for decades — because the controls programming is hard-coded. Thousands of lines of rules and heuristics that define how the machines interact with each other. The result of all this hard-coding is that facilities are frozen in time, unable to adapt to their environment while their performance slowly degrades.
Phaidra creates AI-powered control systems for the industrial sector, enabling industrial facilities to automatically learn and improve over time. Specifically:
- We use reinforcement learning algorithms to provide this intelligence, converting raw sensor data into high-value actions and decisions.
- We focus on industrial applications, which tend to be well-sensorized with measurable KPIs — perfect for reinforcement learning.
- We enable domain experts (our users) to configure the AI control systems (i.e. agents) without writing code. They define what they want their AI agents to do, and we do it for them.
Our team has a track record of applying AI to some of the toughest problems. From achieving superhuman performance with DeepMind's AlphaGo, to reducing the energy required to cool Google's Data Centers by 40%, we deeply understand AI and how to apply it in production for massive impact.
Phaidra’s ability to achieve its mission is determined by our ability to work together — as defined by our core values: Agency, Velocity, Craft, and Truth. We seek individuals who embody these values, as they are instrumental in ensuring our team consistently delivers excellence and fosters an engaging and supportive culture.
Phaidra is based in the USA, but we are 100% remote with no physical office. We hire employees internationally with the help of our partner, OysterHR. Our team is currently located throughout the USA, Canada, UK, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Singapore, Australia, and India.
Who You Are
You are a hands-on IT leader who treats IT as an enablement function, not a ticket queue. You have run IT for a fast-scaling, remote-first technology company and you know what it takes to be at the scale of 150+ employees and operate without losing velocity: identity and access that just works, devices that arrive configured on day one, and a tooling request process measured in days, not weeks. You are deeply technical, comfortable being both the strategist and the person who ships the fix, and you understand AI-native ways of working well enough to evaluate, sandbox, and roll out AI tools that make the whole company faster.
This is Phaidra's first dedicated Director of IT. IT is being established as its own function, reporting directly to the CTO, as a peer to our Security (Cyber Enablement) and Infrastructure organization. You will inherit a small existing IT function and build the team, systems, and processes for our next phase of growth. You will not do this alone: enablement at Phaidra is a three-way partnership, and you will work with counterparts in our Cyber Enablement (Security) organization and the Productivity Engineering team within Infrastructure on every evaluation and rollout.
We are seeking teammates who are based in the UK or North America (Eastern timezone).
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Responsibilities
As Director of IT, you will:
Build and Lead the IT Function
- Establish IT as a first-class function with its own charter, roadmap, and budget, reporting to the CTO.
- Build and manage the IT team, inheriting existing IT operations and growing the team to match company scale.
- Define the IT strategy for scaling a remote-first, globally distributed company to 150+ employees.
- Operate within clear ownership boundaries alongside two peer organizations: Security owns security strategy, architecture, standards, risk management, and detection and response; Productivity Engineering owns developer tooling and engineering workflows; IT owns the business systems and services that keep employees productive. Where domains overlap, decisions are made jointly with the peer team.
Employee Enablement and Tool Lifecycle
- Own the software and tool request process end to end: intake, evaluation, trial, procurement, and rollout. Security review and developer-workflow review are built into the process through the peer teams.
- Partner with teams across the company on a regular cadence to understand tooling needs and deliver the fastest path to safe adoption.
- Manage the SaaS portfolio: licensing, renewals, vendor consolidation, and spend.
AI-Enabled IT
- Lead evaluation and rollout of company-wide AI assistants and employee-facing AI tooling. Security owns the security of AI adoption end to end: threat modeling and baselining of AI systems, integration and connector review, data-access and agent-permission guardrails, and monitoring of AI tool usage. Productivity Engineering leads developer-facing AI tools. IT rolls out within those boundaries.
- Apply AI to IT operations itself: reduce toil in support, onboarding, and request fulfillment.
- Stay current on the AI tooling landscape and proactively bring options to teams.
Core IT Operations
- Operate account lifecycle and access management across the SaaS estate (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Notion, Linear, and more): provisioning, deprovisioning, access request fulfillment, and license assignment. Security owns identity architecture and standards, including SSO and MFA policy, the authorization model, and privileged access; IT operates to those standards.
- Administer the Microsoft 365 tenant: tenant administration, licensing, and user provisioning.
- Own device fleet operations: procurement and logistics, MDM administration, patching, and device retrieval. Security defines the device security baseline and network security configuration; IT deploys and maintains devices to that baseline.
- Run onboarding and offboarding so every new hire is productive on day one and every departure is clean, complete, and auditable.
- Own helpdesk and internal IT support with clear SLAs.
Security and Compliance Partnership
- Operate as a peer to the Security organization: IT executes and enables, Security governs and audits. This separation of duties is by design and applies across identity, devices, and SaaS.
- Support the company's compliance programs (SOC 2, ISO 27001): asset inventory hygiene, device compliance evidence, and access review execution within the compliance platform.
- Escalate risk-acceptance decisions that exceed established thresholds to the leadership team.
Key Qualifications
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- 10+ years in IT, with 5+ years leading IT as a function or equivalent ownership of IT for a large research/engineering organization, ideally through a scaling phase (50 to 200+ employees).
- Deeply technical: hands-on with identity providers, MDM, device security baselines, SaaS administration, and scripting/automation. You can still do the work, not just direct it.
- Track record of running IT as an enablement function, with concrete examples of reducing tool-approval friction while maintaining a strong security posture.
- Experience evaluating and deploying AI tools in a company setting, with a working understanding of their data-access and security implications.
- Experience supporting compliance programs (SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar) and working with automated compliance platforms.
- Comfort operating in a remote-first, globally distributed company.
- Strong judgment on build vs. buy, and disciplined SaaS vendor and spend management.
- Clear communication and the ability to say a productive "yes, with guardrails" to demanding technical teams.
- Proven ability to operate through counterpart teams: shared ownership, joint processes, and influence without sole authority.
- Share our company values: agency, velocity, craft, truth.
Preferred Skills & Experience
- Experience running IT for research or engineering-heavy organizations.
- Experience standing up an IT function from scratch.
- Scripting and automation skills (Python, Bash, or Go) for IT workflows and integrations.
- Familiarity with zero-trust access models and modern endpoint security tooling.
- Prior experience as a senior IC or manager in a large-scale research/AI organization.
Our Stack
- Productivity & Collaboration: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Notion, Linear
- Device Management: Jamf Pro (MDM), Firstbase (procurement & logistics)
- Compliance: Vanta (SOC 2, ISO 27001 automation)
- Cloud: GCP
- Engineering Tooling (owned by Productivity Engineering, your counterpart team): GitLab, Kubernetes (GKE), Terraform/Kapitan
- AI Tooling: actively evaluating and expanding — you will shape this jointly with Productivity Engineering and Security.
Onboarding
In your first 30 days...
- Learn Phaidra's product, org structure, and how teams work day to day in a remote-first company.
- Take ownership of the existing IT function: current tooling, device fleet, identity setup, open requests, and the IT specialist joining your team.
- Meet your counterparts in Security, Productivity Engineering first, then leaders across Product Development, Infrastructure, Business Operations and Research, to map the biggest enablement pain points and in-flight tool requests.
- Review the current tool request backlog and ship at least one visible improvement to turnaround time.
By your first 60 days...
- Publish the IT charter jointly with Cyber Enablement and Productivity Engineering: what each team owns, how tool requests flow across the three, and the escalation path to leadership risk tiers.
- Stand up the joint tool evaluation process with counterparts from both Cyber Enablement and Productivity teams.
- Establish baseline metrics: request turnaround time, device compliance rate, onboarding readiness, SaaS spend.
By your first 90 days...
- Own IT operations end
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