IT Director

SmartTech Contracting LLC; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

SmartTech Contracting LLC is seeking an IT Director to lead the IT function as the company scales a fully remote national workforce. You will set IT strategy, build the internal team, manage MSP relationships, and drive security, compliance, and platform modernization across the organization.

This leadership role reports to the President and collaborates with the VP of Engineering and Business Management Office to shape the technology roadmap, budget, and policies.

Responsibilities

• Translate company objectives into the annual IT plan and delegate IT leads and partners.
• Own STC’s IT strategy and multiyear roadmap tied to growth targets.
• Define the IT operating model for growth stages and in‑house transitions.
• Make build/buy/stop decisions based on value, cost, risk and capacity.
• Own the IT budget, licensing and cloud spend; report costs clearly.
• Lead change management and measure adoption across departments.
• Hire, coach and lead the initial IT team and plan hires.
• Manage and develop IT leads and later managers; ensure succession.
• Lead recruiting and headcount planning to prevent single points of failure.
• Identify and remove roadblocks for IT team and partners.
• Maintain a workforce plan growing the team as the company scales.
• Own MSP relationship; define SLAs and handoffs; move services in‑house.
• Engage interim specialists for defined scopes with clear handoffs.
• Build a remote team culture of service and continuous improvement.
• Own Azure tenant and landing zone with production/test/dev separation.
• Establish a paved road from prototype to production with CI/CD and IaC.
• Govern the application portfolio with defined owners and readiness.
• Own the reliability of production systems and recovery testing.
• Provide hosting, environments and controls for client‑facing software.
• Own Microsoft 365 information architecture and retention.
• Support SPI and the AI Program Manager; IT provides secure stack.
• Set up AI platform foundations: licensing, accounts, access, telemetry.
• Own security and data-governance guardrails for AI use.
• Unblock staff by removing friction for access and approvals.
• Lead business systems integration with ERP, scheduling, reporting.

Job description

Smart Tech Contracting delivers turnkey BAS & EPMS solutions for mission-critical colocation and hyperscale data centers operating at national program scale. As a Master Systems Integrator (MSI), we unify controls construction (DDC, PLC, SCADA) with software engineering, optimized graphics / UI standards, and program-level governance.

Complex integrations are delivered cleanly, consistently, and fast. Our teams thrive in high-stakes environments where quality control and uptime matters, schedules are compressed, and coordination is everything.

Join us and be part of a team where your voice matters, your work makes an impact, and your growth is a shared priority.

Position Title: IT Director

Position Location: Remote - work virtually from anywhere in the United States

JOB SUMMARY

The IT Director owns Smart Tech Contracting’s information technology function as the company scales from a small specialty contractor into a midsize, technology-driven organization. STC is growing rapidly across a fully remote national workforce. There is no internal IT team today; a managed service provider (MSP) delivers corporate IT. This role sets IT strategy, builds the internal team, owns the platforms and policies, and steadily brings in‑house the capability the MSP delivers today. IT serves every STC department, office, and field team.

STC engineers, project teams, and field staff are increasingly building their own software, automations, and AI agents. The IT Director is a builder and an enabler, not a gatekeeper. Success is measured by how much faster STC staff can move safely: taking a prototype from a laptop to a supported service in days rather than weeks, securely connecting an SPI-approved AI tool to Microsoft 365 and business systems, standing up an environment in hours instead of weeks, or answering a hyperscale client’s security questionnaire with confidence. Policies are owned by this role, kept practical, improved continuously, and written so the secure path is also the easiest path.

This is a dedicated leadership role. The IT Director leads the function through its leads and is accountable for their performance, owns the annual IT plan, headcount, and budget cycle, and develops, modifies, and executes company policies that affect immediate operations and have company-wide effect. Because STC is building IT from the ground up, the role is hands‑on in its first phase, leading a small team covering development and DevOps, cloud and infrastructure, and security and compliance, with some roles combined early. As leads are hired, routine hands‑on work tapers to involvement by exception (architecture review, major incidents, and client security escalations), and the team grows into an operating model that fits a midsize company, with outside partners used for defined, specialist work. The IT Director is a strong tactical decision‑maker who handles unforeseen issues without waiting for direction, and an emerging strategic leader who spends increasing time on strategy, technology trends, and patterns across the business.

This role is NOT responsible for AI strategy or AI tool selection. Special Projects & Innovation (SPI) and the AI Program Manager lead AI adoption and the shared AI framework; IT plays the supporting role, owning the software stack, security, policy, integration, and support that framework runs on. AI enablement and adoption remain in SPI for now; as the program and the IT team mature, some of that responsibility may move into IT. This role is also not a traditional corporate IT administrator, a compliance‑first governance function, or the company’s sole developer or cloud engineer. It is the accountable owner for how technology is built, run, secured, and continuously improved at STC.

The IT Director reports to the President and works closely with the VP of Engineering & Technology, the AI Program Manager, the Director of the Business Management Office, department leaders, and STC’s MSP.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS

IT Strategy, Roadmap, and Scaling Ownership (20%)

• Translate company objectives into the annual IT plan: set operational objectives and work plans, delegate assignments to IT leads and partners, and review results to determine the success of operations.
• Own STC’s IT strategy and a prioritized multiyear roadmap tied to company growth targets (headcount, revenue, service lines, and client requirements), revisited as the business changes.
• Define the IT operating model for each stage of growth: what STC owns, what partners deliver, and when each capability moves in‑house.
• Make build, buy, continue, and stop decisions based on business value, total cost, risk, and support capacity; retire tools and duplicate efforts as readily as adding new ones.
• Own the IT budget, licensing, and cloud spend; report cost and value to leadership in plain terms, such as cost per active user and cost per environment.
• Lead change management as IT practices change across the company, involving department leaders and users early, piloting with real teams, and preparing people for new platforms, policies, and ways of working; measure adoption, not just publication.

Leading Leaders, Team Building, and Insourcing (20%)

• Hire, coach, and lead the initial IT team, combining roles early and sequencing hires as the business scales.
• Manage, develop, and hold accountable the IT leads, and later the managers beneath them; this is the defining accountability of the role as the team grows.
• Lead recruiting, determine headcount within plan, and maintain succession planning so no critical system or service depends on one person.
• Proactively identify and clear roadblocks for IT team members and the partners working under STC direction.
• Maintain a workforce plan that grows the team with the company, including service desk, platform engineering, and application support, and reduces reliance on the MSP over time.
• Own the MSP relationship: define responsibilities (RACI), service levels, and escalation, review performance, and restructure the agreement as services move in‑house; require documented, usable handoff rather than permanent dependency.
• Engage interim consultants, audit specialists, and contract developers for defined scopes with clear deliverables and handoff.
• Build a remote team culture of service, ownership, and continuous improvement that reflects STC’s core convictions.

Platform, Cloud, and Software Delivery (20%)

• Own the Microsoft Azure tenant and landing zone: management group and subscription structure separating production, test, and development, a governed sandbox for prototypes, and the identity, networking, backup, patching, monitoring, and inventory standards behind them.
• Establish a paved road from prototype to production: shared repositories, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, hosting templates (virtual machines, containers, and platform services), environments, and release and rollback, so staff building with AI coding tools can ship without reinventing infrastructure.
• Govern the application portfolio from intake through retirement; require a named business owner, backup owner, and support readiness before any tool goes into production use.
• Own the reliability of production systems the business depends on, including recovery testing.
• Provide the hosting, environments, and controls needed for client‑facing software and data platforms as STC’s software and service offerings grow.
• Own Microsoft 365 information architecture jointly with the Business Management Office and AI Program Manager, including site, group, and Teams structure, retention, and external sharing, as the company grows.

AI Platform Support and Business Systems Integration (10%)

• Support SPI and the AI Program Manager, who lead AI enablement, tool vetting, adoption and training and own AI tool decisions. IT provides the secure software stack the AI program runs on and removes friction; it does not own or block AI tool decisions.
• Set up and maintain the AI platform foundations: licensing and tenant configuration for approved tools, service accounts and managed identities, connector and API access, agent publishing controls, and usage and cost telemetry.
• Own the security and data-governance guardrails for AI use, including approved models, data classification, and access rules, in partnership with SPI.
• Unblock staff by removing friction from access requests, licensing, environments, and approvals for tools SPI has vetted; measure and shorten turnaround times.
• Lead business systems integration jointly with the relevant leads, connecting ERP, scheduling, reporting, and project systems as tools come online.