Want to join a dynamic company that's disrupting the real estate development and financing industry? Are you ready for a high-impact role that's critical for company growth and scale to own and evolve the IT strategy?

 

Who Is MarshallZehr?

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MarshallZehr Group provides intelligent financing solutions to builders and developers by partnering with private and institutional investors.

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Since day one, they have been doing things differently. They were founded in 2008 - amid the global financial crisis - and were dedicated to driving change in their industry. 

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Their vision is to help change the real estate development and financing industry through major advancements in technology to ultimately drive better outcomes for all of their stakeholders.  

 

Financing real estate developments and construction is a very complex and technical craft, however, it is amongst one of the least technology-enabled industries due to these complexities. They saw first-hand that their industry was ripe for innovation, so they took on the task of building out a new industry standard fuelled by technology. They have developed their own proprietary software to disband those complexities. Their platform allows them to have better access to data, improve their quality of service and reduce risk for stakeholders. This solution serves as their competitive advantage, and they have ambitious growth plans on the horizon to scale this platform and their service. Learn more about their proprietary technology platform for financing solutions here. 

 

How Will I Make An Impact?

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We are looking for an IT Lead to join the MarshallZehr team.  The team is a mix of in-house personnel and an external vendor; this is a hands-on leadership role that implements both team and infrastructure best practices. Your time will be split into 3 major areas: Team Leadership, Infrastructure, and Technical Support.

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Team Leadership – as the leader of IT, you will be responsible for distributing work, setting the roadmap, collaboration with business groups and executive team, mentoring team members, and putting in place processes that allow the team to operate efficiently and effectively.

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Infrastructure – you will own all the technical infrastructure at MZ. Servers, networking, telephony, video conferencing, mobility, identity, security, and SaaS – all your domain.  You will deploy new tools and systems, constantly upgrade their systems to keep up with best practices, and proactively protect them from threats.

Technical Support – you will ensure that MZ's employees receive great technical support by directing the efforts of Tier 1 personnel, triaging new requests as they arrive, and handling escalated/complex/sensitive requests yourself.  You will also develop runbooks, scripts, and articles that help them resolve requests quickly – or avoid them entirely.

 

Their Software and Systems

Their infrastructure is hosted on AWS, built with Terraform and versioned through GitLab.  About two-thirds relates to the in-house mortgage administration tool that the MZ software team develops; the remainder includes systems like Active Directory, file shares, and a handful of utility servers.

The office network is a mix of Ubiquity and Cisco. The team is almost all Windows (hardware from Dell and Microsoft), with a small number of Apple systems in the mix.  Cell phones are an even mix of Android and iPhone; we provide a phone and plan for all employees.

On the SaaS side, we use Microsoft 365 for email/calendaring, Slack for messaging, Zoom for video conferencing, and Grafana Cloud for logging/alerting. Okta ties everything together with SSO.

Projects underway or about to begin include containerizing their services to run on ECS Fargate, MDM for computer and phone management, refactoring the backup strategy, and making better use of native AWS services like FSx and Cognito.

 

The Role

In your role as IT Lead at MarshallZehr, you will:

• Be responsible for all IT systems, from the physical infrastructure at the office to the cloud

• Manage a team of IT personnel, and mentor them in IT best practices

• Design the technical infrastructure on which MZ operates – and constantly improve it to provide more ease and efficiency

• Ensure the team has a great support experience – both by proactively avoiding issues and by working with them as real humans

• Craft IT policies to support in-office and remote work while protecting MarshallZehr data and networks

• Monitor the security and uptime of the systems, and resolve issues as they arise

• Develop IaaS scripts in Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell, or Bash to automate IT processes

• Write support articles and develop automations to permit the team to self-serve common IT requests

• Order and manage IT equipment, from employee devices to video conferencing and telephony gear

• Deploy and monitor applications built by the software team, and set monitoring, logging, and deployment standards for them to follow

• As your duties involve getting hands-on with devices at the office, this position will likely require 3-4 days of work from the office each week (the balance can be either in-office or remote).

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Our Ideal Candidate Looks Like: 

• We are looking for a passionate, self-directed person who has a vision for how a modern IT department should be run and will not let anyone get in the way of making that a reality.

• We are looking for candidates that have:

• 5+ years of professional IT/DevOps experience; we look for skills rather than time served so if you are ahead of your peers and otherwise meet the requirements – apply!

• Technical degree/diploma is preferred; we will also consider candidates with sufficient and similar practical experience

• 1+ years of experience managing a team, including project management, mentoring, and roadmaps

• Experience providing technical support for Windows, Active Directory, and Microsoft 365; experience with macOS, Okta, Slack, Zoom, and other SaaS products an asset

• Friendly and approachable bedside manner – and the skill to solve any user problem rapidly and successfully

• Experience with asset management and purchasing, and the insight to know when to spend and when to save

• Experience designing and managing cloud infrastructure on AWS; or similar skill with Azure or GCP

• Working knowledge of network management (routing, network security, load balancing, Wi-Fi)

• Working knowledge of IaaS scripting (Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, etc.) and Git

• Working knowledge of alerting/logging systems (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, etc) and the best practices for them

• Strong project management skills – and a reputation for getting things done

• Experience with Docker is a significant asset

• Security or cloud certifications are an asset

 

We understand, accept, and value the differences between people of different backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, ages, beliefs, and abilities.  We aim to create an inclusive environment and encourage diverse individuals to appl

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We’d love to hear from you - even if you don’t meet 100% of the requirements! If this sounds interesting to you, send a note to erin@artemiscanada.com or leigh@artemiscanda.com