Head of IT

Who we are at Osmo: Osmo is a digital olfaction company, on a mission to give computers a sense of smell to improve the health and wellbeing of human life. Why? Our sense of smell both enriches and saves lives, and has a deep and direct connection to our emotions and memory. Olfactory Intelligence has applications across industries including fragrance, manufacturing, security, medicine, and more. We believe in the power of automation and thoughtfully applied AI/ML to solve problems beyond the reach of human intuition alone. Osmo is headquartered in Elizabeth, NJ, with an additional office in Somerville, MA. Osmo is scaling rapidly and needs a hands-on, operationally excellent IT leader to own infrastructure, security, endpoint management, identity, vendor management and employee IT experience. We’re looking for a manager or director-level candidate who can bring startup-grade speed and a Series-B level of discipline: clear deliverables, strong documentation, reliable execution, and measurable SLAs. Role summary You will be the owner for Osmo’s workplace IT and security operations. You’ll own the IT roadmap, vendor relationships (SaaS, MDM, identity, security), incident response, asset lifecycle, and a high-quality employee support experience. You will be expected to be both strategic (roadmaps, budgeting, compliance) and tactical (hands-on implementation, troubleshooting), and to communicate clearly with the executive team. Core responsibilities - Operational ownership - Own day-to-day IT operations: identity and access management (SSO/MFA), device lifecycle and MDM, endpoint security, network, backups, and remote-work tooling. - Maintain and improve an employee-facing IT service model (ticketing, SLAs, knowledge base, onboarding/offboarding). - Security & compliance - Implement and maintain baseline security controls (MFA, patching, least privilege, phishing defenses, logging/monitoring). - Lead incident response, forensics and remediation; create runbooks and playbooks. - Prepare the company for audits or investor / partner security reviews; implement risk reduction projects. - Serve as the primary guardian of the organization's digital assets, responsible for developing, implementing, and maintaining a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy - Vendor & contract management - Own relationships and contracts with critical vendors (Okta/SSO, MDM, endpoint/EDR, cloud providers, SaaS procurement), negotiate pricing, drive cost optimization and vendor SLAs. - Manage outsourced IT partners and contractors. Ensure high quality of deliverables and transparency. - Infrastructure & cloud - Coordinate with engineering on cloud identity, network segmentation and secure access patterns; partner effectively with engineering/devops teams where responsibilities overlap. - Own on-prem or hybrid infrastructure if present (or cloud spend & lifecycle if fully cloud). - Process, documentation & governance - Build and enforce IT policies (acceptable use, device policy, BYOD, password/credential standards). - Deliver clear, up-to-date documentation: asset inventory, runbooks, onboarding/offboarding checklists, project plans. - Establish measurable KPIs: ticket response/resolution times, patch compliance, uptime SLAs, time to onboard, incident MTTR. - People & communication - This role will initially be an individual contributor with a path to building a team as Osmo scales. - Communicate clearly to executives and non-technical staff; produce concise status reports, risk summaries, and roadmap updates. Success criteria (first 90 days) - Deliver a 30/60/90 day plan including top 10 critical risks and remediations. - Implement an authoritative IT asset & identity inventory. - Establish ticketing SLAs and reduce ticket backlog by measurable amount (e.g., 50%). - Implement or improve an MDM + SSO baseline and resolve high-risk issues (unpatched endpoints, overly permissive access). - Provide a security & continuity roadmap, including vendor consolidation o