Senior IT Manager

Senior IT Manager

Solen Software Group is an evergreen holding company that acquires and operates software businesses with strong fundamentals and long-term potential. We invest for the long term, empower entrepreneurial teams, and build enduring companies across a growing portfolio of SaaS businesses.

Solen is hiring a Senior IT Manager to help mature the IT function across the holding company and more than twenty operating companies. This person will inherit a partially built environment with standards and implementations already underway, uneven documentation, and a mix of internal and external support. The mandate is to make that environment reliable, repeatable, secure, well documented, and capable of scaling with the portfolio.

This is a hands-on builder role. During the first year, the Senior IT Manager will personally diagnose problems, complete implementations, support users, document recurring work, and learn the true shape of demand. That operating experience will inform recommendations about what Solen should own internally, outsource, or solve through technology. The role may eventually lead a team, but it is not being hired to inherit a mature organization and manage from a distance.

The Senior IT Manager will recommend improvements, influence operating companies, and execute agreed direction. Jason retains final authority over consequential cross-company standards and major IT decisions, while expecting this leader to challenge assumptions, surface risks, and bring better ideas forward.

What Success Looks Like in Year One

Build a repeatable IT operating foundation. Complete and operationalize core identity and access management, device management, remote monitoring, onboarding and offboarding, code repository, cybersecurity, and governance standards. Execute the IT components of Solen's 100-Day Integration Plan consistently for acquired companies.

Turn knowledge into organizational capability. Create and maintain practical standards, runbooks, and SOPs for major IT components so another capable IT professional can execute recurring work without rediscovering the process or relying on tribal knowledge.

Establish practical security and governance. Apply controls in proportion to business risk, customer and regulatory obligations, cost, and employee friction. This includes Data Loss Prevention, incident response, ongoing compliance review, and repeatable vulnerability and penetration testing completed before applicable public announcements or press releases.

Define the long-term operating model. Use hands-on experience and operating data to recommend which capabilities Solen should build internally, buy, outsource, or reduce through technology. Include the capabilities and talent required, the future role of managed services and contractors, vendor and tool consolidation, and centralized optimization of AWS, Azure, and other hosting costs.

Make IT a trusted business function. Deliver responsive, consistent service and sound recommendations so IT enables operating companies rather than becoming a blocker. Build credibility through execution, practical judgment, and reliable systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Own day-to-day IT execution across Solen HQ and the operating companies, including complex identity, access, device, network, application, and endpoint issues.
• Complete and operate standards for Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Intune or similar MDM platforms, endpoint security, remote monitoring and management, patching, device compliance, and SaaS administration.
• Design and run end-to-end employee onboarding and offboarding, including hardware procurement and recovery, account provisioning and revocation, licensing, data transfer, and evidence capture.
• Maintain practical identity and access controls including conditional access, phishing-resistant MFA, SSO, passkeys or self-service password reset, and least-privilege administration.
• Implement Data Loss Prevention and other information-protection controls appropriate to each business's risk and obligations.
• Establish repeatable vulnerability scanning and penetration-testing processes, including completing applicable testing before public announcements or press releases and tracking remediation to closure.
• Create and maintain incident response plans, security operating procedures, compliance reviews, and recurring risk assessments.
• Execute the IT workstream of the 100-Day Integration Plan for acquisitions and improve the playbook as Solen learns from each integration.
• Standardize tools and practices across operating companies where the value outweighs migration cost and disruption, while documenting justified exceptions.
• Centralize visibility into AWS, Azure, and other hosting spend; identify waste, duplicate services, commitment opportunities, architecture tradeoffs, and practical optimization actions with Finance and technical leaders.
• Evaluate vendors, managed services, contractors, and internal staffing based on capability, service quality, risk, total cost, and recurring demand rather than headcount alone.
• Document systems, configurations, decisions, runbooks, and SOPs in a shared repository and test whether others can execute them.
• Provide useful service and risk metrics to leadership, identify recurring patterns, and improve processes in the sequence reliable, repeatable, optimized, and then automated.

What You Bring

• Broad, hands-on IT capability across identity, endpoints, SaaS administration, networking fundamentals, cybersecurity, device lifecycle, monitoring, troubleshooting, and basic scripting or automation.
• A structured approach to ambiguous environments: assess the current state, separate urgent risk from noise, prioritize, execute, and adjust based on evidence.
• Practical business and security judgment. You can explain likelihood, impact, mitigation value, cost, operational friction, and compensating controls instead of relying on best-practice slogans.
• A builder's mindset. You solve the immediate problem and then create a repeatable process, documentation, ownership, and feedback loop.
• Commercial judgment and a natural focus on cheaper, better, and faster without confusing frugality with choosing the lowest price.
• The confidence to recommend a different approach, challenge assumptions constructively, and operate with appropriate independence.
• Clear communication with technical and nontechnical stakeholders and the ability to influence operating companies without relying on positional authority.

Experience

• Five or more years of progressive responsibility across IT infrastructure, systems, security, and end-user technology in SaaS, software, or another distributed environment.
• Demonstrated experience building or materially improving IT operations in an environment with ambiguity, incomplete documentation, or rapid growth.
• Strong working knowledge of Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Windows administration, and modern endpoint management; working knowledge of macOS and Google Workspace is useful.
• Experience with identity and access management, MDM, endpoint protection, RMM, networking fundamentals, incident response, vulnerability management, and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001.
• Experience supporting acquisitions, multiple business entities, or distributed teams is preferred.
• Experience evaluating managed services, vendors, cloud or hosting costs, and build-versus-buy decisions is preferred.
• Leadership or team-building experience is useful, but current hands-on capability and sound judgment matter more than having managed a large team.

Why This Role

This role offers the opportunity to shape how IT operates across a growing software group. The right person will have meaningful autonomy, direct access to leadership, and the chance to build durable systems while helping determine the team and operating model Solen will need for its next stage.

Solen-isms (How We Operate)

Ownership Mindset: We own the mission. We don't wait to be told. We lead, fix, and build as if it were ours. When problems arise, we run toward them, not away.

Benchmark to Best: We seek out excellence. We measure ourselves against the best and adapt quickly, always looking for the edge that moves us forward.

Openly Self-Critical: Leaders go first: they surface their misses early, ask for direct feedback, and turn "game film" into better decisions and better systems.

Disagree & Commit: Leaders disagree openly and constructively, regardless of title or tenure, because truth is how we avoid bureaucracy and benchmark to best.

Figureitoutiveness: Embracing challenges, fostering growth, and taking initiative, leaders thrive on hard work and high failure tolerance.

Mutual Elevation: Committed to growth, elevating teams, developing future leaders, and removing barriers to mastery and joy.

Learn-it-alls: Learn-it-alls, not know-it-alls, embracing failure as part of growth and progress.

Pioneering: Pioneering driven by opportunity, using first principles thinking and unbound by tradition or rules.

Will to Win: Leaders relentlessly pursue potential, reject mediocrity, and get what they tolerate.

Dialectical: We learn through conversation. We ask, listen, question, and evolve — valuing disagreement as a tool for alignment and deeper understanding.

Frugality: Achieving more with less, focusing on quality, long-term value, and company-wide responsibility.

Candor: We communicate