Lead IT Change Manager

About The Role

We're building our first formal IT change management practice from the ground up. Today, changes to production systems, infrastructure, and business-critical applications move fast and informally — which has served us well as a startup, but won't scale as we grow into an enterprise. We're not looking to bolt on a heavyweight, bureaucratic change process. We need a “lite,” ITIL-aligned model that a fast-moving engineering and IT organization will actually use — one that captures the right approvals and audit trail without slowing teams down.

Design & own the change management model

• Design a lightweight, ITIL 4-aligned change enablement model appropriate for a fast-growing company — standard, normal, and emergency change categories; risk-based approval paths; delegated authority for low-risk/standard changes.
• Define the roles, responsibilities, and RACI for requesting, reviewing, approving, and closing changes across Engineering, IT, and Security.
• Build the roadmap for evolving the process over time: advisory and opt-in in year one, progressively more structured and eventually mandatory as the organization matures toward establishing enterprise level structure that will meet ITIL and Soc2 standards.

Lead through influence, not authority

• Act as an internal consultant/advisor to engineering and IT teams — explain the “why” behind change management, tailor the pitch to each team, and win voluntary adoption before any process is mandated.
• Partner with engineering leaders to pilot the process on select teams, gather feedback, and iterate quickly.
• Build the case (with data) for why broader, eventually mandatory adoption benefits the business — fewer failed changes, faster audits, establishing enterprise level structure that will meet ITIL and Soc2 standards readiness — and present it to leadership.

Select and configure the tooling

• Select and configure the tooling stack (e.g., Jira/Jira Service Management, Monday.com, or similar) to capture change requests, approvals, risk assessments, and implementation records.
• Design and build automated workflows — routing, notifications, approval gates, status transitions, and escalations — so the process runs with minimal manual overhead.
• Build AI-assisted agents/automations that generate structured, auditable change logs (who changed what, when, why, and who approved it) to support future compliance and audit needs.
• Stand up a change calendar, freeze-window management, and conflict detection across teams and systems.

Govern, measure, and report

• Define and track change management KPIs: change success rate, failed/rolled-back change rate, emergency change percentage, cycle time, and audit findings.
• Run lightweight change advisory reviews for higher-risk changes; keep the bar for standard/low-risk changes fast and largely automated.
• Partner with Security, Compliance, and (eventually) Internal Audit to ensure the process satisfies SOX ITGC change-management control expectations.
• Continuously refine the process based on incident retrospectives, audit feedback, and stakeholder input.