Enterprise IT Manager

IT Manager

Marine technology manufacturer | Fort Lauderdale, FL | Onsite | $140,000 to $180,000 base plus bonus

Retained by Colossus Search Group.

Find out if this opportunity is a good fit by reading all of the information that follows below.

The company

An established marine technology manufacturer with US headquarters in Fort Lauderdale and engineering, service and sales subsidiaries across Europe. Their systems run on commercial, defense and private vessels worldwide. Roughly 10 percent travel to EU sites. Valid passport required.

The team you inherit

Three direct reports, and none of them are a help desk:

• Systems Administrator
• Application Developer
• Master Data Manager

What you own:

Team and service delivery. Ticket queue performance, prioritization and escalation across the team, with service levels reported to the COO. Support roles, escalation paths and knowledge retention practices that reduce key-person dependency. Documentation and runbooks that cut repeat escalations.

ERP support. The company goes live on a major industrial ERP platform in the coming months. The IT Director carries the implementation through go-live, so you are not inheriting a program mid-flight. Your job is the IT side of it: infrastructure and connectivity requirements for integrations, and the primary IT escalation point for ERP issues without disrupting engineering or service delivery. Over time, day-to-day ERP administration settles with your Master Data Manager and you own it through them.

Infrastructure and lifecycle. Servers, networking, end-user devices and business-critical applications across US and EU sites. Lifecycle management, patch management and backup/DR monitoring. Flagging infrastructure changes that exceed current scope or budget.

Security and compliance. Endpoint security, access controls and vulnerability management. The company is working toward CMMC, and leadership is actively pressure-testing which level they actually need (like Level 1). You do not need to know the framework cold. You need to know it exists, understand what it demands of an environment like this one, and have the horsepower to lead the company there once the level is settled.

Vendors and EU coverage. A managed service provider will be in place covering three EU entities. You are the operational point of contact within negotiated SLA terms, tracking performance and escalating gaps to the COO.

Emerging technology. AI initiatives are already underway, including a local LLM runtime and departmental agents. Your job is keeping them inside established data, infrastructure and security guardrails. The engineering team has a capable AI product owner, so this is not a product role.

Compensation and benefits

• Base salary target is $140,000 to $180,000, depending on experience
• Annual bonus
• Health insurance fully covered by the employer
• HSA with employer contribution
• 401k safe harbor with a 4 percent match
• Flat, unbureaucratic culture where decisions do not take six weeks

What you need to have done before

Required

• BS in IT or a related field, or equivalent education, training and experience
• 7+ years of progressive IT leadership with demonstrated ownership of enterprise IT environments in manufacturing, engineering or industrial contexts
• 3+ years managing technical teams across multiple disciplines
• Windows Server, Active Directory / Azure AD and M365 administration
• Foundational networking: switches, routers, firewalls, VPNs
• Patch management, backup/DR monitoring and security hygiene practices
• PowerShell or another scripting language
• ERP experience in a production and engineering environment
• Experience managing IT contractors and MSP relationships, including SLA management and multi-site delivery
• Enough familiarity with regulated environments (CMMC, NIST, ITAR, GDPR) to know what compliance will ask of you, and the judgment to build toward it

Advantageous

• IFS enterprise software
• Marine, manufacturing, production or engineering environments
• Multi-entity or cross-border IT management, including EU operations
• Hybrid infrastructure across on-premises, cloud-adjacent and edge
• SOC 2 and export control exposure through defense or government customers
• Fluency in German, Dutch, French, Spanish or Italian

Disposition. Hands-on and strategic at the same time. Reliable, responsive and detail-oriented. Comfortable holding several competing priorities at once. Straightforward with internal staff and external vendors.

Read this before you apply

The company has been deliberate about scope, and we would rather you know the boundaries now than discover them in month three.

• The environment is in flight, not greenfield. Early value comes from continuity and follow-through on work already underway, not from redesigning it.
• You inherit an 18-month IT roadmap rather than writing one. You take ownership of it, including future revisions, as you ramp. Enterprise technology direction currently sits with an interim IT Director and the COO.
• Infrastructure architecture is established. You operate within it initially. Architectural ownership moves to this role as you ramp and the current contractor engagement concludes.
• Hiring and restructuring decisions require prior approval from operations, finance and HR.
• This is an execution mandate at a generous number. If you want a seat at the executive table and enterprise strategy authority, this is not that role. If you want to run a real environment well, with the resources and the compensation to do it properly, it is.

The interview process

Four steps, and we will tell you where you stand after each one:

1. Phone screen
2. Interview with the Head of Talent and IT Director
3. Interview with the legacy IT contractor, who knows the environment better than anyone
4. Half-day onsite in Fort Lauderdale

Austin Younglove , Founder & CEO, Colossus Search Group

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Client identity is withheld at the client's request and disclosed on the calibration call. xhyhwjd Compensation reflects base salary; the full package is detailed during the process.