Senior IT Manager

About us Fieldtrip is a group of creative growth agencies, led by inBeat , that connects enterprise brands with the creators and communities who move their audiences. We run performance-driven paid media and micro-influencer campaigns for more than 250 brands — powered by a distributed team of roughly 200 people across 15+ countries, and a stack of tools that has scaled faster than the function that supports it. We are a remote-first, contractor-heavy, data-led agency group. We move quickly, we ship real work for real clients, and we care about the infrastructure behind the work as much as the work itself. The role This is the first dedicated IT leadership role across the portfolio. You are not inheriting a function. You are building one. You will own IT end-to-end for ~200 people across 5+ agencies: the tools, the identity layer, the vendor stack, the BYOD posture, and the baseline cybersecurity and compliance that unblocks enterprise client deals. Daily support volume is low, around two access requests a day. This is not a helpdesk job. It is a builder's job with a clear growth track toward leadership. You will partner with the COO, the founders, and the operations team to design an IT function that scales with future acquisitions and gets Fieldtrip ready for SOC 2 Type II and GDPR-grade governance without bloating the team or the budget. What you'll do Own the IT function end-to-end. Systems, identity, access, onboarding, offboarding, tooling, and vendor relationships across every portfolio company. Design for BYOD and distributed teams. Build a security posture that works for personal devices, contractor workflows, and cross-border data realities. Rationalise the stack. Kill shadow IT, consolidate overlapping SaaS tools, and deliver visible monthly savings on platforms like Figma, Notion, Airtable, Adobe Suite and their cousins. Stand up baseline security. MFA, SSO, endpoint protection, incident response, and a living risk register aligned to NIST CSF or ISO 27001. Get us client-ready. Microsoft 365 setup that just works, enterprise security questionnaires answered without scrambling, and a trajectory toward SOC 2 Type II and GDPR-grade data handling. Lead, write, document. Turn tribal knowledge into runbooks. Explain IT risk and tradeoffs in plain English. Build the function so it doesn't depend on you. What we're looking for Must-haves 5+ years of hands-on IT ownership at a remote-first Startup or Scale-up, ideally a marketing or creative agency, or a tech startup. Experience building an IT function from scratch, or meaningfully restructuring one. Deep, practical BYOD experience securing a distributed, contractor-heavy workforce. Strong identity and access management foundation (Azure AD + Google Workspace). A builder mindset. You ship systems that run without you. Applied experience with NIST CSF, ISO 27001, or SOC 2 type II + working knowledge of GDPR / CCPA. Excellent written communication. Documentation is a first-class deliverable here. Nice-to-haves Familiarity with POPIA (South Africa) and or PIPEDA (Canada). CISSP, CISM, CompTIA Security+, or equivalent certification (not required). Experience handling enterprise security questionnaires and client procurement alignment. Prior portfolio / multi-entity IT experience. Awareness of CASL as it relates to influencer and campaign outreach. Not a great fit if Your experience is tied to a helpdesk ticket queue. You come from a 10,000+ person corporate IT department and haven't worked in a high-paced startup environment You want to advise and move on. This is an ownership role for someone looking for a long-term career growth track. Why join us You build the function. No legacy system to maintain. No politics to dismantle. A clean sheet and real leadership scope. Real leverage. Every system you design touches ~200 people across 15+ countries from day one. Clear path to grow. Room to build the team beneath you as the portfolio scales and acquires. Remote by design. Work from anywhere with EST / CAT overlap. Contractor-friendly setup. A leadership team that wants an IT function. The mandate, the budget, and the backing are in place — that's why we're hiring.