Senior Manager, IT

About the role

This role sits at the center of two key priorities at Zapier: keeping ~800 Zapiens productive and secure, and building the identity and access controls that enterprise buyers scrutinize. We're looking for someone who wants to run IT as a product, not a help desk — someone who sees AI-first operations and zero-trust architecture as the standard, not a stretch goal, and who's excited to build the team that makes that the norm.

Zapier is ~800 people, fully remote, and IT's first job is to keep the team productive and secure, delivering reliable, fast service, smooth onboarding and offboarding, and a great employee experience at scale. This sits on a backbone of identity (Okta), endpoint management (Jamf), and SaaS governance across 200+ apps. As Zapier moves upmarket, IT also carries a growing mandate: the identity, access, and governance controls that enterprise buyers need to scrutinize. This makes a deep, capacity-backed partnership with Security central to the job and increasingly tied to how Zapier earns enterprise trust.

We're looking for a Senior Manager who's excited to lead a high-performing, globally distributed team driven by building systems that increasingly run on Zapier's own product — energized by the shift toward enterprise-grade IT, and eager to be the gold standard for other IT teams using Zapier.

Responsibilities

• Raise the bar on IT service — AI-first. Move IT from reactive support to a proactive, AI-first operation for ~800 Zapiens — onboarding, offboarding, and employee experience — with self-service provisioning, deflection, and proactive remediation as the operating model.
• Architect identity, endpoints, and zero-trust access. Evolve Okta (SSO, SCIM, OIDC, SAML, MFA, RBAC/ABAC, lifecycle automation) and Jamf (device trust, EDR) into an enterprise-grade access layer, and own the IT side of zero-trust end to end — identity, device, and access — as a co-owner with Security.
• Govern tooling as a portfolio. Treat the app portfolio as a strategic asset. Bring structure, ROI accountability, and vendor governance to 200+ tools, not just approval workflows.
• Own major incidents end to end. Lead high-severity IT operational incident response and the root-cause and prevention that follow. Security incidents route to Security's Detection & Response program; IT partners on containment and remediation.
• Plan IT around where Zapier is headed. Translate company direction — enterprise, AI, scale — into an IT roadmap you own and deliver, so IT is ready ahead of the need rather than catching up to it.
• Influence and hold the line. Set and enforce policy on access, procurement, and security across People Ops, Finance, Legal, Product, and Engineering, moving senior stakeholders, not escalating to them. Partner with Security on security policy, operationalizing and enforcing it within IT's domain.
• Build the IT org, not just the team. Turn a flat, reactive team into a tiered, globally distributed function with depth, not dependence. Lead as a player-coach who rolls up their sleeves on the hardest problems while building the team that makes that the exception, not the norm. You'll lead a team of ~6 today, evolving the structure as IT scales.
• Power the enterprise motion. Make IT the internal proving ground for enterprise access controls and feed gaps to Product — as requested, be the IT reference in enterprise deals, speaking to IT personas about how we run IT on Zapier and handle access and governance at scale.

Requirements

• Proven IT leadership at scale. 8+ years in IT/Systems Engineering, including 3+ years managing engineers — ideally scaling IT in a high-growth, fully remote company. You build teams with real standards and accountability, develop people deliberately, and build depth rather than dependency across timezones.
• AI, automation, and product mindset. You've built, championed, and implemented AI or automation into IT or security operations and treat it as core infrastructure. You're curious by nature — new products, AI, and automation are what get you excited to come to work — and you see running IT on Zapier's own product as a competitive advantage, not a nice-to-have.
• Technical credibility. Deep hands-on experience with Okta (SSO, SCIM, OIDC, SAML, MFA, RBAC/ABAC, lifecycle automation) and Jamf (device trust, EDR), plus SaaS governance at scale — you're the person your team trusts on hard calls. You've partnered with Security on zero trust, enterprise access controls, and compliance (SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001), and understand the work well enough to own the controls and evidence that support them.
• Strategic execution. You turn business direction into a clear IT strategy, and you follow through: plans become results, not slide decks.
• Operational and financial rigor. You run to SLAs and metrics, lead major-incident response, and run SaaS spend with FinOps discipline — optimization targets and ROI.
• Influence and communication. You operate across Security, Legal, Finance, and Engineering at a senior level — you win buy-in and drive people to act, not just weigh in. You frame things clearly in writing and in person, don't bury the lede, and don't soften important messages until they lose meaning. You're equally credible in customer-facing conversations, representing Zapier's IT posture to enterprise IT buyers and security teams.

Nice to have

For a role this broad, we value credentials that span identity, endpoint, security/compliance, and IT operations over deep specialization in any one — and treat all of these as signals, not requirements.

• Certifications (any across these domains; we value breadth over a single track):
  • Identity & access: Okta Certified (Administrator / Professional / Consultant).
  • Endpoint / MDM: Jamf Certified (Admin or Pro), Apple Deployment.
  • Security: CISSP, CISM, or Security+ — CCSP (cloud security) a plus.
  • Compliance & audit: CISA, or ISO 27001 Lead Implementer / Lead Auditor.
  • Cloud: AWS certification (our stack includes AWS/IaC).
  • IT service management: ITIL (service-delivery and SLA maturity).
  • Program / people leadership: PMP or equivalent a plus.