IT Manager
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 12, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 16, 2026. Lumai scores A on the Alion truth index.
The Opportunity
Lumai's engineers, scientists and office team all run on the same basic kit: a working machine, the accounts they sign in with, the software they need, and a room they can take a call from. It gets set up by hand today, around someone else's day job, and the team is growing quickly.
That is the job. You would take the manual work out of setting people up and keeping them running - the machine build, the accounts, the software, the meeting rooms - and make it repeatable enough that a new joiner's first morning is kit and access that already works.
The Role
What you own. You will own Lumai's day-to-day IT end to end: the device fleet and how each machine is built and secured, the identity and accounts people sign in with, the software and licences we run, and the Oxford office's network, printers and meeting-room kit. You are the person the team comes to when something does not work, and the person who has a new joiner ready before their first morning.
What is genuinely hard about it. You are the only person doing this, so nothing arrives with a process around it. The estate is small enough that every fix is one you make yourself, and busy enough that the same fix should never be needed twice. Your users are engineers who can often solve their own problem and should not have to, and the security and access rules have to hold without slowing any of them down. The hardest part is not the technology: it is that the answer you give at four o'clock on a Friday, with nobody to check it, has to be right.
By month six, you will have an asset record that matches what is actually on the desks, an onboarding and offboarding routine that runs the same way every time, a standard machine build and software catalogue rather than a shelf of one-offs, and networking and meeting rooms reliable enough that nobody mentions them.
What You'll Do
Own the device fleet end to end: order, build, secure, hand over and recover laptops and desktops, and keep the asset record accurate from order to return.
Set and run the standard machine build, so two machines of the same kind are set up the same way.
Run identity and accounts: create, change, close and audit accounts and groups, and keep access right for leavers as well as joiners.
Be the escalation point for day-to-day IT: proactively identify, diagnose and resolve hardware, operating system, application and connectivity problems across the team.
Look after the Oxford office's networking and meeting-room kit - Wi-Fi, wired ports, printers, screens and video calls - so a room works the first time.
Manage the software and licence estate: what is installed, who holds a licence, what renews when, and what it costs.
Run the IT side of onboarding and offboarding with Talent and the Office Manager, so kit and access are ready before day one and closed off when someone leaves.
Partner across the company to champion AI adoption and drive automation, eliminating manual toil. You will build scalable workflows using custom agents, scripts, and API integrations.
Cover desk IT only: laptops, desktops, peripherals, accounts, software, office connectivity and meeting-room kit, with lab, test-bench and specialist engineering equipment owned outside this role.
What We're Looking For
Must-have
Hands-on IT support in a fast-moving company, where you owned the estate rather than working a queue inside someone else's process.
Experience managing and scaling SaaS and core collaboration tools across the business, as it scales.
Confident across end-user machines - building them, securing them, fixing them - on our platforms macOS and Windows.
Practical experience with identity and device management: an identity provider, an MDM, or both.
Office networking and AV that hold up in practice: Wi-Fi, wired ports, printers and meeting-room video.
Clear communication - you will spend as much time explaining a fix to someone who is not technical as you will making it.
Strong preference for
Experience in a deep-tech, hardware environment, where some of the machines are attached to equipment rather than a desk.
Experience supporting engineers' own machines and development environments, without owning the engineering platform itself.
Having set up a device fleet, an identity platform or an MDM from scratch rather than only maintaining one.
Proficiency in scripting languages to eliminate repetitive setup, patching, and reporting workflows.
About Lumai
Lumai is the optical compute company building the next generation of AI infrastructure. Spun out of optics research at the University of Oxford in 2021, we compute with light instead of electrons. Our 3D optical technology carries out the matrix multiplications at the heart of AI inside beams of light travelling through free space, which lets it go beyond the limits of both silicon GPUs and integrated photonics.
In April 2026 we launched the world's first optical computing system to run billion-parameter large language models in real time. Our first optical computing server is now available for evaluation by hyperscalers, neoclouds, enterprises and research institutions.
Our work won the Falling Walls Award for Science Breakthrough of the Year 2025 and 'Best Overall Technology' at the OCP Future Technologies Symposium. We are headquartered in Oxford.
Why Lumai
You'll work on a new kind of computer. Optical computing for AI has been promised for decades. We have a working system running real models, and the hard part left is taking it to volume.
Your work ships. We are moving from first product to volume production, so what you build this year goes into the servers our customers run.
You'll work across disciplines. Optical engineers, machine learning researchers, and hardware and software engineers solve problems together. You will learn things that don't appear on your job description.
The work matters beyond Lumai. AI's appetite for energy is one of the defining constraints of the next decade. Our mission is sustainable intelligence at global scale: AI that is faster, cheaper to run and far less power-hungry.
You'll join early. You'll have a real say in how we build the product, the team and the way we work.
Equal Opportunity
Lumai is an equal opportunity employer. We make hiring decisions based on skills, experience and potential, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds. If you need an adjustment at any stage of the hiring process, let us know and we will do our best to support you.