IT & Systems Manager (AI-First)

About Bells of Steel Inc.

At Bells of Steel, our mission is to make fitness and strength training approachable, affordable, and fun. We design and manufacture high-quality strength and exercise equipment for home gym owners and fitness professionals, helping people of all experience levels achieve their goals.

We’re not your typical fitness equipment brand. We’re down-to-earth, a little cheeky, and focused on making fitness more rewarding and less intimidating. If you enjoy a fast-paced, no-BS environment and want to help shape the future of strength training, you’ll fit right in.

Our Core Values: A.C.T.

Adaptability – Raise the Bar
We challenge the status quo, learn quickly, and continuously improve. We embrace change, seek better ways of working, and take initiative to drive results.

Customer Centricity – Always Spot the Customer
Everything we do is focused on helping our customers succeed. We lead with empathy, build trust through action, and create value for both external and internal customers.

Teamwork – We Win Together
We operate with honesty, transparency, trust, and respect. We collaborate openly, take shared ownership of outcomes, and succeed as a team.

About the role

We're looking for an IT & Systems Manager who builds and maintains — and who can be trusted with the systems the company runs on.

Our team ships internal tools with Claude Code every week, and we'd rather build than buy whenever building is the better answer. That speed needs someone in charge of it.

You'll lead our small technical team: our AI and internal tools developer, a contract AI engineer, and the app developers we're hiring now. You'll set the rules for how we build and review what ships. You'll also own the systems the business depends on — our ERP, our data, our email, our devices and our security — and keep them fast, accurate and standing up through our busiest weeks of the year.

Some days you're building. Other days you're making sure what everyone else built is safe to run. The second part is not the lesser half of this job.

This isn't a ticket-queue job. If you fix the same problem twice, you automate it.

The non-negotiables

You build with Claude Code first, and you check its work after. You let Claude take the lead and you act as the architect. You can explain every change you approve, and you've verified it works and it's secure.

You've run things in production, not only built them. You've owned a system people depend on every day — an ERP, a warehouse or order system, a company's core infrastructure — through a migration, a peak season, or an outage at the wrong hour. You know what you'd do differently next time.

You're AI-first, not AI-curious. When someone asks for a tool, a report or a fix, your first question is "can Claude do this?" You use Claude Code, Cowork and MCP servers every day, and you can teach a warehouse lead or a CS agent to use them safely.

You're hands-on with real hardware. Laptops, phones, printers, label printers, scanners and Wi-Fi. When something breaks in the warehouse, you're the one who walks over and fixes it.

You're in Calgary. You live here or you'll move here before your start date. The job is hybrid, but hardware, the warehouse and the team mean regular days on site, so remote from another city or country won't work.

What you'll do

Lead the technical team

• Manage our AI and internal tools developer and the app developers, and coordinate with our contract AI engineer
• Set priorities with leadership, run code reviews, and own how internal tools and the training app get released and rolled back
• Own our development rules: company code in the company GitHub, company data in company databases, secrets scanned before every push, nothing important tied to one person's account

Run company IT

• Onboarding and offboarding: accounts, devices and access set up on day one and shut off on the last day
• Keep our employees productive across our Canadian, US, UK, Australian and German operations
• Manage our software stack and what it costs: licences, renewals, and cutting tools we don't need
• Buy, set up, track and fix laptops, phones, printers, label printers, scanners and networks at the office, warehouse and showrooms
• Manage Clickup, our project management software, including governance, oversight and coaching/continuous improvement to drive higher efficiency over time

Own security

• Password manager, MFA and least-privilege access on every system
• Own the relationship with our managed IT and security provider — device monitoring, threat detection and incident response — and build the capability to bring that work in-house over time
• Set the guardrails for AI agents: read-only first, human approval before anything that touches money, customers or data, and protection against prompt injection
• Run backups, and actually test them — a restore you've proven, not a job that reports green

Own our data and systems of record

• Own the data platform: pipelines, schema and data model, a maintained data dictionary, freshness and reconciliation checks, and what our queries cost us
• Own data quality — if two systems disagree about a price, a stock level or an order, you own getting to one answer and keeping it that way
• Own consent and privacy in practice: how customer consent is captured and carried across every system in Canada, the US, the UK, Australia and Germany, plus suppression lists, retention and deletion, and where personal data is allowed to live
• Own email and domain health: SPF, DKIM and DMARC at enforcement, separate sending domains for transactional and marketing mail, monitoring, and inbox placement that someone actually watches

Keep the ERP healthy

• Own our ERP in production once it's live: database growth and archiving, indexing, background jobs, report performance, and capacity planning so it doesn't slow to a crawl in our busiest weeks
• Keep customizations documented, version-controlled and upgrade-safe, so an upgrade never turns into a rebuild
• Run the replacements we have in flight — ERP, email platform, shipping — with parity testing against the outgoing system, validated data migration, a written rollback plan, and no cutovers during peak
• Be the person who says what a change will cost before it ships, and who knows which system is the source of truth for every number the company reports

Build

• Build internal tools, automations, MCP integrations and dashboards yourself
• Review and harden the apps the rest of the company builds, and help non-technical staff build safely with Claude

Help the company get better at AI

• Coach teams across the company — warehouse, customer support, finance, marketing — on building and using AI tools safely and well
• Run the training, office hours and reviews that turn one-off experiments into tools people use every week
• Keep a live view of what's been built across the company: what's working, what's duplicated, and what needs rebuilding properly before anyone relies on it

What success looks like

• Day 30: you've mapped every system, account, device and credential we have, who owns each, and which system is the source of truth for the numbers we run on
• Day 60: every credential lives in the password manager, MFA is on everywhere, every app has a repo, an owner and a reviewer, and you've tested a restore and told us what it proved
• Day 90: the dev team ships on a steady review-and-release rhythm; new hires get working accounts and a laptop on day one and leavers lose access the same day; DMARC is at enforcement with our sending domains separated; and you've published what our core data means and where it comes from
• Through peak season: the ERP stays fast under load, no cutover lands in our busiest weeks, and the numbers the business reports reconcile
• Ongoing: fewer problems reach you, because the repeat ones are automated

What we're looking for

• You've owned IT, systems or software at a small or growing company, usually 5+ years, though what you've done matters more than the number
• You've run a production system of record — an ERP, an order or warehouse system, or equivalent — not only implemented one
• You've moved a company off a system people depend on daily, and can tell us what you tested before cutover and what you'd do differently
• You've led or mentored developers, or you're ready to, and you can review code you didn't write
• Strong on identity and access, device management, networking and SaaS admin
• Comfortable with relational data modelling and query performance, not just writing queries
• Working knowledge of APIs, SQL, Git and TypeScript or Python
• Security instincts: you know what MFA, least privilege, backups and incident response look like in practice, not just on a checklist
• You explain technical calls in plain language to the warehouse, customer support and the leadership team

Bonus points

• ERPNext, Frappe, or another open-source ERP you've customized and lived with afterwards
• BigQuery, Looker, or running a warehouse other people's tools query
• Email deliverability at scale — DMARC rollouts, domain reputation, migrating an email platform
• MCP servers, agents, n8n or other automation platforms
• Supabase, Vercel and GitHub Actions
• Shopify or an ecommerce ERP
• Remote device management and managed security tools
• Warehouse hardware: label printers, barcode scanners, Wi-Fi in big spaces
• Security certifications are nice. Shipped work matters more

We care more about what you've built and kept running than where you learned it.

What's in it for you

• CAD $90,000 - $115,000 base salary
• Health Spending Account
• A Calgary office you'll actually want to come into
• Employee discounts on all our gear
• Access to our staff gym
• A team that actually likes what they do

The schedule & location

This is a hybrid role based at our Calgary location, where the core hours are Monday to Friday from 8:00am to 4:30pm

The Interview Process

• 30 minute screening with our HR Coordinator
• 1 hour screening with our hiring team
• Paid, time-bound technical assessment (in-person)
• 1 hour technical follow-up to discuss assessment
• Reference check (include 2-3 in resume)
• Background check
• Decision made and offer sent out

The pay range for this role is:
90,000 - 115,000 CAD per year(Calgary)

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