Head of IT

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.