IT Lead

This is a Full Time Job

IT Lead
Exceptional Minds (EM) is a Los Angeles-based nonprofit vocational academy and professional digital arts and animation studio. Our academy trains artists with autism in the technical and work readiness skills required for employment in the entertainment industry fields of visual effects and animation. Staffed by graduate artists, our studio contracts for film/television visual effects, animation, end title credits, and video rigging/animation for gaming projects. The ideal candidate will have stellar interpersonal skills that shine when working interdepartmental as well as when representing the organization externally. The candidate must have the ability to exhibit compassion, patience and respect with both team members, students/artists and their families.
Upcoming initiatives include:
-Build and deploy optimized IT infrastructure using solid state and cloud-based technologies such as AWS
-Enhance current remote work process to ensure students and instructors have access to high-end software
-Assess and maintain current IT hardware, software, phones, and systems

Responsibilities:
-Oversee on average 75+ systems that support 50-60 students, faculty, artists at any given time.
-Work closely with organizational leadership to lead and execute technology-based solutions for serving our students and graduate artists
-Define the remote technology function in creating a viable operating system of remote function for the organization-Proactively define and drive organizational objectives, requirements and constraints to improve the student/artist experience, instructor/student interaction and drive towards EM's service goals.
-Develop processes and initiatives to respond to new insights coming from analytics, user research and customer feedback.
-Liaise with vendors and develop relationships for problem solving and innovation.
-Assess and improve upon current office phone system, particularly in relation to remote operations. Manage software licensing and hardware function.
-Own infrastructure execution, working closely with programs leadership to ensure fast,
high-quality implementation and iteration.-Own and report product KP'Is and leading indicators.
-Continuously improve your own and organization's understanding of the IT role in our mission by sharing knowledge and training. Mentor team members who want to explore and contribute.
-Opportunity to build out team downstream as organization scales infrastructure.

Preferred Experience/Skills:
-5+ years' experience in professional programming, Adobe or AWS Cloud system Dev Ops, Infrastructure, SystemsEngineering.
-5+ years' work experience) in Computer Science, Systems Engineering or related subject.
• 2-5 years' experience in Entertainment Industry
-Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical colleagues and constituents, including those on the autism spectrum.
-Experience with monitoring systems and domain for educational systems-Share passion for learning and career-focused education for young people and adults with autism.
-Have relevant experience, e.g. iterating on data pipelines in AWS, tuning and maintaining PostgreSQL, and monitoring, build/deploy systems (node, React, webpack, CIrcleCI)-Experience across the full project life cycle from ideation, planning and exploration through implementation,release and iteration.
-Experience defining systems processes.
-Business acumen to define a strategy that balances business and user experience goals.
-Resourceful and creative with ability to come up with novel solutions and inspire creativity in others.

Exceptional Minds is currently following the stay-at-home order, and will conduct interviews and on-boarding remotely.

Remote work can be accommodated as needed.