IT Manager

IT Manager

Reports to: COO | Level: Senior IC / Manager (6–12 years of experience)

Location: Houston preferred, open to exceptional remote candidates 

Team: Solo at first (player/coach), with a path to build and lead a small team as the company scales 

Compensation: $140K–$200K base bonus

Read This First

Acasia is an early-stage startup. We have a real business with real capital — but we are not a mature company with settled processes, stable org charts, or a fixed business model. A $1B GPU AI Factory is our current flagship vehicle; it is not necessarily what Acasia will look like in 24 months. We expect the company to evolve, new product lines to emerge, and roles — including this one — to grow with the business.

Today we rely on an outsourced IT partner. That arrangement has served us well to this point, but we've outgrown it. We need an internal owner who can transition the function in-house, set it up properly, and eventually build the team to run it.

If you want a tidy IT shop with documented runbooks and a clean CMDB waiting for you, this is the wrong role. If you want to build that from scratch, keep reading.

Role Summary

Acasia is hiring an IT Manager to take ownership of our internal IT function — starting as a one-person team and growing into a small team over time. You will inherit an outsourced relationship, transition it in-house on a realistic timeline, and stand up the systems, policies, and day-to-day operations that a fast-growing infrastructure company needs.

This is a player/coach role in the truest sense. In your first 12 months, you will personally image laptops, set up SSO, resolve tickets, and negotiate vendor contracts. As the company grows, you'll recruit and manage a small team, and your role will shift from doing to leading.

This role is about corporate IT — the systems and services that keep Acasia employees productive and secure. It is distinct from the engineering and operations teams that run our GPU fleet.

About Acasia

Acasia intends to operate a $1B SPV deploying GPUs across Dallas, Columbus, Phoenix, Ashburn, and Atlanta. Acasia itself operates as a managed GPU cloud services provider. Our economics are driven by a Base Service Fee, a Performance Services Fee, and a Disposition Fee.

We handle investor information, customer contracts, and financial data that require real security discipline. IT is not a back-office utility here — it is part of how we keep the trust of our LPs, our customers, and our team.

What You'll Own (Today) Current scope — expect this to shift as the company grows.

The MSP Transition

• Assess the current outsourced IT relationship: what they manage, how well, at what cost, and what the exit looks like.
• Build a transition plan that moves critical functions in-house without service disruption. Decide what stays outsourced, what comes in-house, and what gets replaced entirely.
• Document what exists. Much of the institutional knowledge lives with the MSP today — get it out of their heads and into our systems before they hand over the keys.
• Negotiate the wind-down commercials and service continuity.

Core IT Stack & Identity

• Own the core stack: Google Workspace (or M365), SSO/identity provider, MDM/endpoint management, password manager, VPN, ticketing, and the full SaaS portfolio.
• Make the opinionated calls on what we standardize on. First-version decisions here will shape the company for years — make them deliberately.
• Set up clean identity and access management. Every employee, every system, every offboarding — clean and auditable.
• Manage the SaaS portfolio actively: licenses, renewals, spend, consolidation, and shadow IT.

Security & Compliance

• Partner with leadership on security posture: endpoint protection, patch management, MFA enforcement, phishing defense, incident response.
• Lead the IT side of SOC 2 readiness when that becomes a priority (customer and LP-driven).
• Own access reviews, offboarding rigor, and the audit trail that comes with handling investor and customer data.
• Be the first line when something goes wrong — lost laptops, account compromises, suspicious activity.

Employee Experience

• Own onboarding from offer-letter-signed to fully productive on Day 1: laptop, accounts, software, access, orientation.
• Offboard cleanly. Every time.
• Run helpdesk. In a company of this size, that means you. As the team grows, it means the team you build.
• Own device lifecycle: procurement, imaging, inventory, refresh, retrieval.

Office & Infrastructure

• Own the Houston office from an IT perspective: network, wifi, conference rooms, AV, printers, physical security systems.
• Support remote employees and any satellite presence as we grow.
• Manage vendor relationships for ISPs, hardware, and office tech.

Build the Team (When the Time Is Right)

• Hire your first IT report when workload genuinely requires it — not before.
• Grow into a people-manager role: hiring, coaching, running a small team, setting priorities.
• Your first hire will likely be an IT engineer or analyst focused on helpdesk and endpoint. Later hires may specialize in security, systems engineering, or business applications depending on where the company goes.

How the Role Will Morph

Honest expectations about the path forward:

• Today is hands-on. Tomorrow is leadership. You will personally fix broken laptops in your first six months. You will not be doing that in year three. If the hands-on phase is beneath you, this won't work. If the leadership phase is above you, it also won't work.
• The title and scope will grow. "IT Manager" captures today. This seat could grow into a broader IT leadership role, or specialize into IT & Security, as the company evolves.
• Security may fold in. At this stage, there's no separate security hire. If you have the chops, this role naturally expands to include information security ownership. If you don't, we'll hire that separately — but having real security instincts is a meaningful plus.
• The stack you choose will stick. The MDM, IdP, and SaaS spine you pick in year one is what the company lives with through significant growth. Pick well.

Who You Are

• 6–12 years in IT, with increasing scope. Mix of hands-on execution and functional ownership.
• You've transitioned from an MSP to in-house before — or you've been on the MSP side and watched it done well (and poorly). You know the traps.
• Startup or scale-up experience. You've built or substantially grown an IT function from a small base. You know what "good enough for 30 people" looks like vs. "this will break at 150."
• Opinionated on the core stack. You have views on Okta vs. JumpCloud vs. Google, on Kandji vs. Jamf vs. Intune, on whether we need a VPN or whether ZTNA is the right call. You can defend your views and change them when someone makes a better case.
• Security-literate. You understand the MFA, endpoint, identity, and access-review fundamentals cold. SOC 2 experience is a strong plus.
• Comfortable with vendors. You negotiate, you hold accountable, you fire when needed.
• Calm under pressure. Something will break at a bad time. You handle it cleanly and communicate what happened.
• Service-minded. You care that employees can actually do their jobs. IT that's "secure" but makes the company slow is a failure.
• Discreet. This role touches executive systems, investor communications, and confidential company data. You handle it with complete professionalism.

Nice-to-Haves

• Prior IT Manager or IT Director role at a 30–200 person company.
• SOC 2 or similar compliance lead experience.
• Experience at a financial services, fund management, or infrastructure business where data handling is regulated or sensitive.
• Light scripting (PowerShell, Python, bash) — enough to automate the repetitive stuff.
• Houston-area roots or a real willingness to be here.

Why This Role Is Good

• You will build the IT function from the ground up, with real authority and a real budget.
• Your early decisions on identity, endpoint, and security will shape the company through a major growth phase.
• You will work directly with the COO and have a seat at the leadership table — not buried under layers of IT hierarchy.
• You will eventually hire and lead a team, on a timeline that actually tracks the business.
• You will build a résumé that sets you up for Director or VP of IT roles at your next stop.