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IT Operations Manager

Palo Alto, CA

About Arc Institute

Arc Institute is an independent nonprofit research organization at the interface of artificial intelligence and biology, working to accelerate scientific progress and understand the root causes of complex diseases. Founded in 2021 and based in Palo Alto, Arc partners with Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and UC San Francisco.

Unlike academia, our scientists have long-term funding and industry-like resources. Unlike industry, they're free to pursue high-risk, long-term research without commercial pressures. Arc's Technology Centers and Core Investigator labs work side by side, integrating experimental and computational biology under one roof to tackle problems neither could solve alone.

Our two Institute Initiatives reflect this model in action:

  • Virtual Cell Initiative: Building a full-stack virtual cell model to identify disease mechanisms and nominate drug targets,  accelerating the path from biological insight to clinical trials.
  • Alzheimer's Disease Initiative: Mapping the genes, pathways, and environmental factors behind Alzheimer's disease to develop drug candidates that address root causes.

More than 300 Arconauts work together at our Palo Alto headquarters, backed by substantial long-term philanthropic funding.

About the position

The IT Operations Manager is a technical and operational leader responsible for the day-to-day reliability, performance, and scalability of Arc’s technology systems. This role serves as a key escalation point for infrastructure issues and the helpdesk, and a hands-on operator across our core platforms. The ideal candidate brings deep systems expertise across on-premises and cloud infrastructure, a service-delivery mindset, and the ability to help drive the organization forward. This position is full-time onsite (5 days a week).

About you

  • You love working in a technical environment that is constantly evolving, growing and pushing towards the betterment of scientific research. 
  • You have a strong technical foundation, want to always be learning and to help shape a strong operational support team. 
  • You align your team's work with organizational goals and contribute to broader IT strategy.

In this position you will

  • Oversee the daily operations of the IT department and ensure that systems and networks are running smoothly
  • Lead IT support teams to ensure consistent, high-quality service delivery to Arc
  • Help foster a collaborative, solutions-oriented culture within the team and to the greater organization
  • Define and monitor service level targets; review ticket queues, escalation trends, and resolution metrics to identify systemic gaps
  • Serve as a technical resource for IT team —fielding escalations, providing guidance, and enabling the team to resolve issues more effectively
  • Manage operational technology vendors and service providers to ensure that Arc’s technology needs are met
  • Assist IT Leadership in the development of departmental and technology strategies across Arc’ tech stack, measure upon the effectiveness of these strategies
  • Actively invest in the growth and development of team members by sharing knowledge, providing mentorship, and creating space for others to take on meaningful work
  • Drive continual service improvement by identifying recurring issues, proposing process or tooling changes, and ensuring knowledge base content stays current
  • Collaborate with the team to align helpdesk operations with ITSM best practices
  • Monitor system performance, availability, and capacity across the stack; proactively identify risks and drive remediation before issues impact researchers or staff
  • Oversee configuration management, change control, and documentation standards across managed systems

Requirements

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience
  • 10+ years of progressive IT infrastructure and systems administration experience in a technical operations or senior engineering role
  • 2+ years of experience in managing direct reports
  • Experience overseeing or directly supporting a helpdesk or service delivery function
  • Hands-on expertise with systems administration, design and troubleshooting
  • Practical experience with Google Workspace or MS365 at an organizational scale, including user management, domain configuration, and application integrations
  • Working knowledge of hyperscaler environments (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) at the administration and engineering level
  • Familiarity with the design and build of backup and recovery platforms
  • Ability to produce clear technical documentation and maintain active repositories and knowledge bases
  • Ability to work onsite 5 days a week

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience in managing teams or supporting large scale projects to deliver high output results
  • Familiarity with ITSM platforms (ServiceNow, Freshservice, Jira)
  • Experience in the creation of and execution of IT Strategy initiatives as well as the ability to report on the effectiveness of those strategies
  • Experience supporting HPC or research computing environments
  • Experience with observability tooling for enterprise monitoring and reporting
  • Knowledge of SD-WAN or private interconnect technologies
  • Experience with Okta, including SAML, SCIM and policy administration
  • Relevant certifications (e.g., AWS, Cisco, Google Cloud, Okta, CompTIA, ITIL) are a plus

The base salary range for this position is $157,500 to $195,500. These amounts reflect the range of base salary that the Institute reasonably would expect to pay a new hire or internal candidate for this position. The actual base compensation paid to any individual for this position may vary depending on factors such as experience, market conditions, education/training, skill level, and whether the compensation is internally equitable, and does not include bonuses, commissions, differential pay, other forms of compensation, or benefits. This position is also eligible to receive an annual discretionary bonus, with the amount dependent on individual and institute performance factors.

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