Engineering Manager (IT & Infrastructure)

Employment: Full-time, W-2 employee of our Winchester, Virginia-based client

Location: Hybrid — meaningful in-person presence required in Winchester, VA

Reports to: The CPA firm's Chief Technology & Information Officer day-to-day; our Winchester, Virginia-based client owns employment and career development

Compensation: Base salary $115,000–$125,000, commensurate with experience

About the engagement

We are recruiting on behalf of our Winchester, Virginia-based client, who is hiring an Engineering Manager to embed inside their anchor CPA firm engagement. The hire leads the CPA firm's IT engineering function on the ground and reports operationally into the firm's senior technology leadership, while remaining an employee of our client with full benefits and career development through them.

This is a player-coach role split roughly evenly between two halves. The hands-on half covers automation, networking, cloud, endpoints, and servers across the CPA firm's IT stack. The leadership half is real coaching — sitting next to a junior engineer to walk through a firewall configuration, reviewing work, setting team direction, and translating engineering tradeoffs into business language for the CTIO and the firm's practice leads.

Responsibilities

Leadership and team development (~50%)

• Lead the CPA firm's IT engineering team; mentor and develop engineers through real work
• Set technical direction and standards for day-to-day operations
• Communicate upward to the CTIO and practice leads in business language — status, tradeoffs, recommendations
• Champion practical AI adoption: model thoughtful use, push the firm to treat AI as a force multiplier
• Help shape engineering practices, review culture, and on-call expectations

Hands-on engineering (~50%)

• Architect and build automation tooling and workflows that improve how IT operates
• Engineer infrastructure improvements across the Microsoft cloud (Azure, Entra ID, Intune, Microsoft 365)
• Design and implement networking changes — firewalls, switches, segmentation
• Operate confidently across endpoints, servers, and cloud
• Apply sensible security awareness to everything you ship

Required Experience

• 7 years in IT engineering, infrastructure, or platform work, including prior team leadership (formal or informal)
• Current technical fluency across Microsoft cloud (Azure, Entra ID, Intune, Microsoft 365), networking (firewalls, switches), endpoints, servers, and automation
• Strong PowerShell or comparable scripting; able to build automation end-to-end
• Demonstrable mentorship history — engineers you have measurably improved
• Confident communicating with senior leadership and translating technical decisions into business language
• Sound baseline security awareness — not a specialist, but doesn't need it explained

Preferred Experience

• Genuine AI enthusiasm and practical hands-on use of LLMs, agentic workflows, and automation copilots in your own work
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Bicep, ARM)
• CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps)
• Experience in regulated environments (financial services, professional services, healthcare)
• Prior IT or engineering manager experience in a mid-market firm

Compensation

• Base salary $115,000–$125,000, commensurate with experience
• Full benefits: medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) with employer match
• Paid time off and supported professional development