VP of Internal Systems & IT

Stord is The Consumer Experience Company, powering seamless checkout through delivery for today's leading brands. Stord is rapidly growing and is on track to double our revenue in the next 18 months. To meet and exceed this target, Stord is strategically scaling teams across the entire company, and seeking energetic experts to help us achieve our mission.

By combining comprehensive commerce-enablement technology with high-volume fulfillment services, Stord provides brands a platform to compete with retail giants. Stord manages over $10 billion of commerce annually through its fulfillment, warehousing, transportation, and operator-built software suite including OMS, Pre- and Post-Purchase, and WMS platforms. Stord is leveling the playing field for all brands to deliver the best consumer experience at scale.

With Stord, brands can increase cart conversion, improve unit economics, and drive sustained customer loyalty. Stord’s end-to-end commerce solutions combine best-in-class omnichannel fulfillment and shipping with leading technology to ensure fast shipping, reliable delivery promises, easy access to more channels, and improved margins on every order.

Hundreds of leading DTC and B2B companies like AG1, True Classic, Native, Seed Health, quip, goodr, Sundays for Dogs, and more trust Stord to deliver industry-leading consumer experiences on every order. Stord is headquartered in Atlanta with facilities across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Stord is backed by top-tier investors including Kleiner Perkins, Franklin Templeton, Founders Fund, Strike Capital, Baillie Gifford, and Salesforce Ventures.

The Opportunity
Stord is made up of two complicated businesses under one roof. We build and run software at scale, and we operate an international, multi-site fulfillment and parcel network. Our enterprise systems have to carry both, which makes them as complex as anything in the product. These systems were built for a smaller company than the one we are now.

This role is responsible for elevating this system.

There are two direct domains. Business Operations owns the enterprise systems Stord runs on, the processes sitting on top of them, and the quality of the business data inside them. IT owns identity, devices, access, and end-user experience for a company adding headcount monthly, as well as the physical network and device infrastructure inside every fulfillment and parcel site we run. In partnership with Procurement you own Stord's SaaS estate company-wide. Engineering's tooling is also in that scope: R&D chooses it, you administer it.

You report to the SVP of Product & Engineering, sit alongside the Head of Engineering, the VP of Data, and the VP of Security as peers, and work daily with leadership across Finance, Revenue, People, Legal, and Operations.

This is not a blank slate, nor should you want one. What currently exists is here because it has to be: we are already a scaled operation, billions in GMV across hundreds of brands, and the systems carrying that are load-bearing. You inherit a capable team and a stack that works. What’s missing is architecture, clear ownership, and someone with a point of view on both.

The test is what comes next. Taking an operation already at this scale and building it for the future, without slowing anything down. Plenty of leaders can add control to a fast company. We are hiring the one who can add control while maintaining necessary speed.

How We Think About This Role

IT is a product, not a ticket queue. We measure this function by whether a Stord employee can do their job on day one and every day after, not by SLA attainment on tickets that should never have existed. A well-run IT function makes most of its own tickets disappear.

Sophisticated application of AI Before we add a person, buy a tool, or build an integration, the first question is whether an agent can do the work. You own making AI the normal way your own functions operate, and being the person who can tell a genuine agentic workflow from a thin wrapper around an API call if a vendor is selling you one.

One system of record per domain. Customers, vendors, products, locations, employees. If a team is keeping a shadow spreadsheet, that is a defect in your architecture.

Tool sprawl is a tax, and you are the person who collects it. Every SaaS application at Stord gets a named owner, a renewal date, a utilisation number, and a security posture. R&D will continue to decide the tools they need. You own everything after that decision, from the contract and the licence count to who has access and what happens at renewal. Bring the same rigor to a $200k observability contract as we bring to a $200k ERP module, and give Procurement a technical counterpart who knows what the contract is actually for.

Build, buy, or cut, decided deliberately. We will support a build when the process is ours and nothing off the shelf fits it. We will not back a build that exists because a configuration was hard. We should cut as often as we build or buy.

Process before automation. Automating a broken process buys you a faster broken process. We would rather you delete a step than script it.

If you read that and disagreed with any of these, tell us when we talk. That is a better conversation than agreement.

What You'll Own

Enterprise systems and architecture

• The strategy, architecture, and roadmap for Stord's business technology stack across CRM, ERP, HRIS, CLM, Procurement, and Customer Success platforms

• Integration and data-flow decisions between those systems, and the ownership model that keeps them from drifting apart again

• A documented architecture with named owners, prioritised by business impact and not by who asked loudest

Business process and master data

• Governance for the domains that matter most: customers, vendors, products, locations, employees. Defined once and sourced once

• The standards and quality frameworks that make business data something the company can build on, in close partnership with the VP of Data whose platform consumes it

• The source-system side of metric consistency. Data sets the canonical definition; you make sure the CRM, ERP, and HRIS capture it that way, so three teams asking the same question get the same number

• Finding the processes creating the most drag across Finance, People, Legal, Support, and Operations, and rebuilding them instead of automating the old shape

IT, corporate and on site

• IT strategy and day-to-day operations: identity and access management, device lifecycle, end-user support, and the corporate network

• The physical network and device estate across our fulfillment and parcel sites: handheld scanners, label and packing-station printers, floor wifi coverage, switching and routing, ISP circuits and failover. If the network drops in a fulfillment center, orders stop shipping, and that outage is your responsibility

• Standing IT up for a new site or a new country on the timeline Operations commits to

• The endpoint, identity, and access controls themselves, operated by your team to the standards the VP of Security sets. You run them, Security governs them, and the two of you agree what good means before an auditor does

• Onboarding and offboarding that are fast, complete, and boring, at the pace of a company adding headcount monthly and entering new countries

• An IT function that gets ahead of problems, with the operating rhythm and metrics to show it

SaaS and vendor portfolio

• Company-wide ownership of the SaaS estate, run jointly with Procurement. Engineering tooling is in scope for administration, contracts, licensing, access, and renewals; R&D keeps the selection call

• Renewal calendar, utilization data, consolidation plan, and a recommendation at every renewal instead of an auto-renew

• Third-party and sub-processor diligence across the estate. Every tool touching employee or customer data is reviewed before it is bought and re-checked at renewal, to the standard Security and Legal set

• Security and compliance review for new tooling, including AI tools adopted anywhere in the company, and IT administration for AI platforms company-wide: procurement, provisioning, access, and licence management

Privacy and compliance

• Privacy operations sit with IT today, because IT is where the systems are. You inherit GDPR, the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework certification, records of processing, DSARs, retention schedules, and vendor data processing agreements on day one

• As the VP of Security builds out GRC, program ownership moves there alongside SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Running it well in the meantime and handing it over cleanly is part of this job. We would rather tell you that now than after you join

• What stays with you permanently is enforcement: data residency, retention, and deletion in the business systems. Where an employee or customer record lives, how long it stays, and how it is removed when it should be.

• Access reviews, segregation of duties, and change control across the financial and HR systems, built to survive an audit and, in time, SOX IT general controls

• Evidence on demand. When an auditor, an enterprise customer's security review, or a regulator asks how a control works, the answer comes out of your systems rather than a spreadsheet someone assembled that week

AI adoption inside your own functions

• Make IT and BizOps the proof case for how Stord works with AI, actually measured against the projected value

• Partner with the functions you serve so their operating processes get AI-native treatment, and with R&D leadership where an internal need warrants purpose-built software instead of configuration

M&A systems integration

• Business systems integration when Stord acquires: get the acquired company onto Stord's stack and standards on a predictable timeline, not left running as a permanent side system

• Partner with Corporate Development on technical and operational due diligence for future targets

Team

• Lead and grow a team across IT and Enterprise Systems, including an established Director of IT

• Build the rigor and follow-through that makes other functions want you in the room

• Earn trust well outside your reporting line. This role only works if people change how they work because you asked them to

How This Role Works With Its Peers

These seats are distinct on purpose, and the seams between them matter more than the boxes.

VP of Security. Security owns the strategy, the security program, the security team, detection and response, and the control standards. You own the operation of the controls that live inside IT: identity, endpoints, device posture, access lifecycle. Security says what good looks like; you make it true across every laptop and every account, and you bring the evidence to audits. Security also builds the GRC function that will take privacy program ownership from you, so an early piece of this partnership is getting that handover right. This partnership fails when it turns into a negotiation at audit time. It works when the two of you agree on the standard before the tooling is bought.

VP of Data. Data owns the data platform, analytics, BI, decision science, and AI-first access to Stord's data. You own the business systems that are among the most important sources feeding it, and the governance of the master data inside them. Data owns what a metric means; you own whether the systems capture it that way. If a number is wrong, Data will usually find it and you will usually be the one who can fix it at source. You are jointly accountable for the business trusting that number.

Procurement and Finance. Procurement owns the commercial process, supplier relationships, and negotiation. You own the technical evaluation, the architecture fit, the security posture, and the honest utilisation picture that tells Procurement what leverage they have.

Legal. Legal owns the legal calls: lawful basis, controller and processor posture, contract and DPA language, and what we say to a regulator. You own the operational program today and the systems enforcement permanently. Expect to be the person who tells Legal what the systems can and cannot do, rather than waiting to be told.

Head of Engineering. Engineering owns customer-facing software, the production estate, and our applied AI work, and chooses the tooling its teams build with. You are their internal counterpart, not their competitor. You administer the tooling they choose, you hold them to the same portfolio discipline as every other function, and when an internal problem needs software built instead of bought, you bring the case and they help you resource it.

What Success Looks Like In your first year:

• Stord has a documented enterprise systems architecture with named owners and a prioritized roadmap the executive team has actually agreed to

• Business leaders trust the numbers coming out of our systems, and the shadow spreadsheets are measurably fewer

• The SaaS estate is fully inventoried with owners, renewals, and utilization visible, and you have rationalised a meaningful portion of it with the savings attached

• IT gets ahead of problems instead of reacting to them. Onboarding and offboarding are fast and complete, and employees say so

• Identity, access, and endpoint controls meet the standard the VP of Security has set, and hold up under audit without a scramble

• Privacy operations are in better shape than you found them, and the program has either transitioned cleanly to GRC or has a dated plan to

• At least two functions outside R&D are running a materially better process than a year earlier, with AI doing work a person used to do and numbers to show it

• If we closed an acquisition this year, its business systems are on Stord's stack rather than bolted on the side

• You have a leadership team you trust and a function known for getting things done

What We're Looking For Experience

• 10+ years leading enterprise systems, business technology, corporate IT, or a combined function, with direct budget and hiring ownership

• Has owned a complex multi-system business technology ecosystem end to end: CRM, ERP, and HRIS at minimum, through a migration or consolidation and not steady-state administration

• Has run corporate IT as a proactive function at a company growing fast, ideally through international expansion

• Has owned IT for distributed physical sites and not only offices and remote workers: floor networking, handheld devices, connectivity, and the operational stakes that come with them

• Has owned a SaaS portfolio company-wide and worked properly alongside Procurement, with consolidation and savings you can point to

• Has run or materially supported a privacy or compliance programme in practice: GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, or equivalent. You do not need to be a privacy lawyer, but you need to have been accountable for evidence that held up

• Has integrated business systems following an acquisition and can describe what got merged into one operating model, not what was left running in parallel

• Background in technology or tech-enabled businesses. Logistics or operations experience is a plus, not a requirement

AI

• An AI adoption story from inside an operating function, measured after the fact. We will ask what changed, who stopped doing what, and how you knew

• Working knowledge of the current AI and agentic tooling landscape, sharp enough to make build-versus-buy calls yourself instead of relying on a vendor's deck

• A view on where AI changes a back-office process and where it is theater. We would rather hear one honest "that didn't work" than five polished case studies

Technical depth

• Deep fluency in enterprise application architecture, integration patterns, and master data management

• Solid grounding in IT operations, identity management, and endpoint and access controls. You do not have to do the work yourself, but you need to know when it is being done well

• Enough technical credibility to read an integration design, push back on an approach, and hold your own with senior engineers and with the VP of Data

Leadership

• Earns trust across functions. Finance, Engineering, Revenue, People, and Operations all want you involved

• Change management that sticks: you can get a Sales or Support team to adopt a new way of working, not just tolerate a mandate

• Clear communicator who can take a systems problem to an executive team as a business decision

• Comfortable operating in the seams between peer VPs without needing the org chart to resolve every question for you

Bonus points

• You have taken a company through IPO readiness or operated inside a public company, including SOX IT general controls. We don’t know our future but we want the rigor of a public company

• You have supported international expansion: multi-entity ERP, multi-country HRIS and payroll, data residency

• You have supported a business with a physical operation, where a systems failure means something does not ship

• You have been on the receiving end of an acquisition as well as the acquiring side

This Role Is Not For Everyone

The scope is deliberately bounded. You will not own our AI engineers, our forward-deployed engineering team, or our security program. Those are separate seats. If your ambition is to build a product engineering organization, this is not that role and we would be wasting each other's time.

What you get instead is an unambiguous mandate over the systems the whole company depends on, at a business doubling in size, acquiring, and expanding internationally with both a physical and virtual team. Nobody here needs convincing that this function matters, which is an argument most people in this job spend their first year losing somewhere else.

If you have worked somewhere that talked about systems excellence but never funded it, this is your opportunity to realize that dream.

Originally posted on Himalayas