About the engagement
You will be embedded with our anchor CPA firm client, leading their IT engineering function and reporting directly into senior technology leadership. You remain a ForgePath employee with full ForgePath benefits and career development.
This is a player-coach role. Roughly half your time is hands-on engineering and architecture across the firm's IT stack — automation, networking, cloud, endpoints, servers. The other half is leading and developing the engineering team: sitting beside a junior engineer to walk through firewall configuration, reviewing work, setting team direction, and translating between the engineering bench and the firm's senior leadership.
Responsibilities
Leadership and team development (~50%)
- Lead the client's IT engineering team; mentor and develop engineers through real work
- Set technical direction and standards for the team's day-to-day operations
- Communicate clearly upward to the CTIO and practice leads — status, tradeoffs, recommendations in business language
- Champion practical AI adoption: get the team excited about AI, model thoughtful use, push the firm to use AI as a force-multiplier
- Help shape engineering practices, review culture, and on-call expectations
Hands-on engineering (~50%)
- Architect and build automation tooling and workflows that improve how the firm's IT operates
- Engineer infrastructure improvements across the Microsoft cloud (Azure, Entra ID, Intune, Microsoft 365)
- Design and implement networking changes — firewalls, switches, segmentation
- Operate confidently across endpoints, servers, and cloud
- Bring sensible security awareness to everything you ship
Required
- 7+ years in IT engineering, infrastructure, or platform work, with prior team leadership (formal or informal)
- Broad and current technical fluency across: Microsoft cloud (Azure, Entra ID, Intune, Microsoft 365), networking (firewalls, switches), endpoints, servers, and automation
- Strong PowerShell or comparable scripting; comfortable building automation end-to-end
- Demonstrable mentorship history — engineers you have measurably made better
- Confident communicating with senior leadership; able to translate technical decisions into business language
- Sound baseline security awareness — you do not need to be a security specialist, but you should not need it explained to you either
Preferred
- Genuine AI enthusiasm and practical use of AI tools (LLMs, agentic workflows, automation copilots) in your own work
- Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Bicep, ARM)
- CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps)
- Experience in regulated environments (financial services, professional services, healthcare)
- Prior IT manager or engineering manager experience in a mid-market firm
Compensation
- Base salary $125,000–$135,000, commensurate with experience
- Full benefits: medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) with employer match
- Paid time off and ForgePath-supported professional development