IT Operations Lead - Reliability, Security & Automation

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bi-annual bonus structure

Equity grant over 4 years

Relocation bonus up to $15k

Housing stipend up to $10k

Meal stipend $1.5k/month

Equinox gym membership

Laundry reimbursement $200/month

Wellness reimbursement $200/month

Health, Dental, Vision insurance

Job summary

Mercor is hiring its first IT Operations Lead to own the reliability, security, and scalability of our IT systems. Based in the San Francisco or New York office, you will partner with the Head of IT to transform reactive support into proactive, automated resilience for our growing AI platform.

You’ll lead incident management, automate where possible, mentor teammates, and help shape our IT strategy as Mercor expands in a fast-paced, high-impact environment.

Qualifications

• 5-7 years in IT Operations or Technical Support roles, supporting technical teams (SaaS, cloud, AI/ML environments).
• Strong incident management skills: triage, root-cause analysis, blameless postmortems, pattern recognition.
• Understanding of compliance controls (access management, logging, change management).
• Clear communicator who can explain technical issues to engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Triage and resolve Tier 2/3 tickets with a focus on automation and improving response and resolution times.
• Manage and troubleshoot Apple devices at hyper-scale.
• Trace root causes across multi-system failures and propose automation or self-service solutions.
• Analyze downstream impacts before changes; map dependencies and blast radius for SSO, MDM, and access-control changes.
• Build and maintain runbooks, troubleshooting guides, and knowledge base articles.
• Lead small projects addressing operational pain points (BYOD policies, international provisioning, compliance evidence collection).
• Translate technical issues for non-technical stakeholders during incidents and changes.
• Mentor future IT team members on troubleshooting methodology and systems thinking.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and help establish escalation procedures as the team grows.

Skills

Incident management

Systems thinking

Clear communication

Automation mindset

Mentoring

Tools

Okta

Google Workspace

Apple device management

Scripting (Python, Bash)

MDM (Kandji/Jamf/Intune)

Job description

Mercor is hiring its first IT Operations Lead to own the reliability, security, and scalability of our IT systems. Based in the San Francisco or New York office, you will partner with the Head of IT to transform reactive support into proactive, automated resilience for our growing AI platform.

You’ll lead incident management, automate where possible, mentor teammates, and help shape our IT strategy as Mercor expands in a fast-paced, high-impact environment.