Head of IT

Cerebras Systems

$150K — $200K *
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years in corporate IT with 5+ years in leadership roles at high-growth tech companies
  • Experience scaling IT operations through significant headcount growth (2-5x)
  • Hands-on experience with AI coding agents and scaling operations with AI tooling
  • Familiarity with SOX ITGCs or equivalent control frameworks and audit processes
  • Technical expertise in identity management, networking, and endpoint security
  • Proven ability to build IT teams respected by engineering counterparts
  • Skilled in making quick, compliant decisions with good judgment on process automation.

Responsibilities

  • Develop global IT strategy, roadmap, and budget for various IT domains
  • Scale IT organization in line with employee growth, including hiring and regional coverage
  • Manage identity and access, including SSO, MFA, and workflow automation
  • Oversee endpoint management across diverse operating systems with appropriate security measures
  • Govern and integrate SaaS platforms, including vendor negotiations and spend control
  • Establish corporate networking and expand office infrastructure as needed
  • Provide executive support for leadership and board interactions
  • Implement IT service management processes to enhance employee experience
  • Maintain IT controls and ensure readiness for audits in collaboration with other departments
  • Build out business continuity and incident response plans for corporate systems.

Benefits

  • Join a groundbreaking team at the forefront of AI technology
  • Opportunity to work on one of the fastest AI supercomputers globally
  • Engage in cutting-edge AI research with a focus on publishing and open sourcing
  • Experience job stability within a dynamic startup environment
  • Benefit from a non-corporate work culture that values individual beliefs.
Full Job Description
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.

Why Join Cerebras

People who are serious about software make their own hardware. At Cerebras we have built a breakthrough architecture that is unlocking new opportunities for the AI industry. With dozens of model releases and rapid growth, we've reached an inflection point in our business. Members of our team tell us there are five main reasons they joined Cerebras:
  1. Build a breakthrough AI platform beyond the constraints of the GPU.
  2. Publish and open source their cutting-edge AI research.
  3. Work on one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world.
  4. Enjoy job stability with startup vitality.
  5. Our simple, non-corporate work culture that respects individual beliefs.

Read our blog: Five Reasons to Join Cerebras in 2026.
Apply today and become part of the forefront of groundbreaking advancements in AI!

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