Head of IT

Cerebras; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity in a fast-growing AI company

Work on cutting-edge AI technology

Relaxed corporate culture

Job summary

A leading AI technology firm in Sunnyvale, CA, is seeking a Head of IT to build the internal tech backbone. The role involves leading global IT strategy, scaling IT operations, and managing systems essential for company functions. Candidates should have over 10 years in corporate IT, with significant experience in a high-growth tech environment. The position requires strong technical skills in identity management and endpoint security, along with the ability to navigate a rapidly changing landscape.

Qualifications

• Over 10 years of corporate IT experience, including 5 years in high-growth tech.
• Experience with identity and access management, including SSO and MFA.
• Strong hands-on technical skills in modern endpoint security.

Responsibilities

• Lead global IT strategy and budgeting across various IT functions.
• Scale the IT organization with company growth, including hiring.
• Manage identity access and endpoint fleet across diverse OS.

Skills

Corporate IT experience

Leadership in high-growth technology

Hands-on experience with AI

Identity management (Okta, Entra)

Strong technical depth

Communication skills

Education

10+ years in corporate IT

Experience dealing with SOX ITGCs

Tools

MDM (Jamf, Intune)

Endpoint security tools

Job description

Cerebras Systems builds the world’s largest AI chip, 56 times larger than GPUs. Our novel wafer-scale architecture provides the AI compute power of dozens of GPUs on a single chip, with the programming simplicity of a single device. This approach allows Cerebras to deliver industry-leading training and inference speeds and empowers machine learning users to effortlessly run large-scale ML applications, without the hassle of managing hundreds of GPUs or TPUs.

Cerebras’ current customers include top model labs, global enterprises, and cutting-edge AI-native startups. OpenAI recently announced a multi-year partnership with Cerebras, to deploy 750 megawatts of scale, transforming key workloads with ultra high-speed inference.

Thanks to the groundbreaking wafer-scale architecture, Cerebras Inference offers the fastest Generative AI inference solution in the world, over 10 times faster than GPU-based hyperscale cloud inference services. This order of magnitude increase in speed is transforming the user experience of AI applications, unlocking real-time iteration and increasing intelligence via additional agentic computation.

About The Role

We are hiring a Head of IT to build and run the internal technology backbone of a company that is scaling quickly and operating at the edge of AI hardware and software. This is not a steady-state IT leadership job, It is a build-and-scale role for someone who thrives when the ground is moving.

You will own the systems that Cerebras employees, contractors, and executives rely on every day: laptops, identity, SaaS, networking, collaboration, endpoint security, internal support, and the IT controls that a company of our maturity needs to have in place. You will keep a highly technical, impatient engineering population unblocked while hardening the environment to standards expected of a company at our stage, including SOX-grade ITGCs and SOC 2.

Responsibilities

• Global IT strategy, roadmap, and budget across corporate IT, end-user computing, collaboration, identity, and internal networking.
• Scaling the IT organization as headcount grows, including hiring, leveling, and building regional coverage across US, EMEA, and APAC.
• Identity and access management: SSO, MFA, lifecycle automation, least-privilege, and joiner-mover-leaver workflows across a fast-changing org.
• Endpoint fleet management across macOS, Windows, and Linux, with zero-touch provisioning, MDM, patching, and a hardened baseline that works for AI research workflows.
• SaaS governance: rationalizing and integrating the SaaS portfolio, running vendor selection, contracts, renewals, and spend control.
• Corporate networking, Wi-Fi, VPN/ZTNA, and office buildouts as sites open and expand.
• Executive support for leadership, board, and investor-facing interactions.
• IT service management: ticketing, SLAs, on-call, knowledge base, and employee-experience metrics.
• IT controls and audit readiness, partnering with Security, Legal, and Finance.
• Business continuity, disaster recovery, and incident response for corporate systems.

Skills And Qualifications

• 10+ years in corporate IT with at least 5 years leading IT at a high-growth technology company, including experience scaling through 2-5x headcount growth.
• Direct hand‑on experience with AI coding agents, LLM’s, scaling operations with AI supporting tooling.
• Hands‑on experience operating IT in an environment subject to SOX ITGCs or equivalent control frameworks, including working directly with internal and external auditors.
• Strong technical depth across identity (Okta, Entra), MDM (Jamf, Intune), networking, and modern endpoint security. You can go toe‑to‑toe with your engineers, not just manage them.
• Track record of building IT teams that engineering respects.
• Ability to move quickly without breaking compliance posture. You know where a manual process is fine for now and where it is not.
• Good judgment on buy‑vs‑build and on when to automate vs. when to ship a process and iterate.
• Direct, clear communicator, comfortable briefing the CEO, CFO, and Audit Committee.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with hardware labs, manufacturing, hardware engineering etc.
• Experience supporting AI/ML research organizations or semiconductor and hardware engineering teams.
• Exposure to global expansion, including EMEA and the Middle East.
• Experience working in environments with sensitive IP and export‑control considerations.

How You Work

• Bias to action. In a company moving at this pace, a slow decision usually costs more than a wrong one.
• Focused on the people you support. Your job is to take friction out of their day.
• Pragmatic about technology. You pick boring, reliable tools where you can, and invest in sophistication only where it moves the needle.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, reorganizations, and shifting priorities.
• High ownership. If it is broken and it touches an employee, you treat it as yours, even if the fix lives in someone else’s system.

Why Join Cerebras

People who are serious about software make their own hardware. At Cerebras we have built a breakthrough architecture that is unlocking new opportunities for the AI industry. With dozens of model releases and rapid growth, we’ve reached an inflection point in our business. Members of our team tell us there are five main reasons they joined Cerebras:

1. Build a breakthrough AI platform beyond the constraints of the GPU.
2. Publish and open source their cutting‑edge AI research.
3. Work on one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world.
4. Enjoy job stability with startup vitality.
5. Our simple, non‑corporate work culture that respects individual beliefs.

Read our blog: Five Reasons to Join Cerebras in 2026.

Apply today and become part of the forefront of groundbreaking advancements in AI!

Cerebras Systems is committed to creating an equal and diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

We celebrate different backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We believe inclusive teams build better products and companies.

We try every day to build a work environment that empowers people to do their best work through continuous learning, growth and support of those around them.

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