Director of IT United Salad Co.

•3.0 Portland, OR Job Details $120,000

•$140,000 a year 20 hours ago Qualifications Vendor relationship building IT user and group management Technical documentation Network management Cloud server management Access control management Network infrastructure management

Full Job Description Location:

Portland, OR 97211

Onsite/Remote:

Onsite

•no remote work available

Salary:

$120,000

•140,000 annually (DOE) + Bonus opportunity About United Salad During World War II, Mary Spada started washing and cutting salads in a bathtub and selling them from a flatbed truck to working women who had no time to prep dinner. Four generations later, United Salad Co. is a family-owned group of companies doing roughly $500M in combined sales across produce distribution, freight, fresh-cut processing, and produce brokerage. United Salad Co. has over 600 employees, 120 trucks, and 300,000 square feet of cold storage and warehouse space across Portland, Bend, and Sumner, WA, serving retail and foodservice customers in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska. Our facilities are

GFSI-SQF

certified and run one of the most stringent food safety programs in the produce industry.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

Most director-level job descriptions describe the department you will inherit. This one describes the department you will build. Today, IT at United Salad is a small team supporting a large, complex operation: a multi-entity company running Produce Pro (Aptean)

ERP, EDI

with major retail partners, a 120-truck fleet with ELD telematics, and four sites — carrying roughly twenty years of accumulated technical debt. The daily fires are real. The opportunity is that most of the fundamentals do not yet exist in written, enforced form. The person who builds them will own them. You will report directly to the CFO, who is personally engaged in this turnaround and will fund the roadmap as it proves out, including additional support headcount early. But understand the shape of the job: for the first 12-18 months you are a player-coach. You will close tickets when the queue demands it. You will write the SOPs. You will be on-site for cutovers. If you want a seat where you direct from altitude on day one, this is not that seat. If you have been the de facto backbone of the department and are ready to own the whole board, keep reading. The Role in Three Phases Phase 1 — Stabilize (first ~6 months) Get ahead of the daily fires. Establish ticket discipline and triage. Complete the in-flight network modernization across our sites. Build the asset inventory, verify backups, clean up access control, and write runbooks for the ten most common recurring issues. Phase 2 — Systematize (months 6-18) Turn tribal knowledge into institution. Written, enforced policies for onboarding/offboarding, access management, change management, and a security baseline. Rationalize vendors and put them on a real management cadence. Stand up endpoint and patch management. Grow the support team and build its habits. Phase 3 — Elevate (18 months and beyond) With fires down and systems holding, the work shifts to proactive: maturing the security program, optimizing the ERP alongside operations and finance, and partnering with the CFO on the company's business intelligence and data infrastructure roadmap. What You Will Actually Do Own all IT operations across the family of companies: infrastructure, security, end-user support, business applications, and vendor management. Deliver hands-on support and escalation personally when needed — while building the systems that make it needed less. Write, implement, and enforce IT policies and SOPs. This means you writing them, not commissioning them. Manage and develop the internal support team; hire as the roadmap justifies it. Own external vendor and MSP relationships: performance, contracts, and escalations.

Lead the security program:

standards, employee training, and compliance support (PCI, plus systems adjacent to

HACCP/SQF

food safety requirements). Partner with department leaders to translate business needs into practical solutions a largely non-technical workforce will actually adopt. Plan and execute infrastructure projects, including off-hours cutover and maintenance windows as projects require. Report progress against the phase roadmap to the CFO with honest metrics. Who Thrives in This Role You have been the senior systems administrator, infrastructure lead, or IT manager who was the de facto backbone of the department and you are ready for your title and recognition to match the reality. You have seen what mature IT operations look like somewhere, so you will be installing proven patterns, not inventing from scratch. You document without being chased. You can tell a 25-year warehouse veteran "no" kindly, and mean it. You look at twenty years of tech debt and feel opportunity, not dread. This Is Probably Not the Right Role If Your first instinct in a new seat is to design the org chart. You have been more than a few years away from hands-on work and prefer to stay there. You need a mature team beneath you to be effective out of the gate. Qualifications Deep hands-on competence across core infrastructure: networking, server and cloud administration, identity and access management, endpoint management, backup/DR. Demonstrated experience building documentation, SOPs, or policy from scratch — bring examples. Experience supporting ERP or line-of-business applications in distribution, manufacturing, logistics, or similarly operational environments. Produce Pro / Aptean familiarity is a plus, not a requirement. Experience managing vendors and/or MSP relationships. Enough leadership experience to grow a small team. Formal management tenure matters less than evidence that people follow you. Clear written and verbal communication with non-technical audiences. Onsite in Portland, with periodic travel to Bend and Sumner, WA. Compensation $120,000

•140,000 salary annually plus bonus, commensurate with the mandate. We will discuss compensation openly and early in the process. Equal Opportunity United Salad Co. is an Equal Opportunity employer in compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as amended and the nondiscrimination regulations of the Secretary of Agriculture as now or hereinafter amended (7 CFR Part 15). Furthermore, United Salad Co. complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, The Age Discrimination Act of 1975, and the Federal Equal Opportunity Act.