OUR PEOPLE
The people who pick up
Three people answer for this, and you should know who they are.
After that, the team is described by role rather than as a directory. A wall of headshots tells you nothing useful and goes out of date the first time somebody leaves. Six groups do the work: here's what each does, when you'd talk to them, and what qualifies them.
Who’s accountable
Elliot Steele
Chief Information Officer
Elliot ran IT across concrete and steel plants before SafeIT existed: multiple sites, three shifts, and the 2am calls that come with them. That experience is why SafeIT is scoped around production impact rather than ticket volume, and why the assessment starts by asking how long you can not ship.
LinkedIn: profile link for Elliot Steele is not published yetHector Kearns
Founder & Chief Technology Officer
Kearns Technology
Hector founded KTI in 2010 and still sets its technical direction. His approach is field-earned rather than theoretical, and he personally visits early members rather than delegating the first relationship to a sales process.
LinkedIn: profile link for Hector Kearns is not published yetAli Mirkarimi
Chief Executive Officer
Kearns Technology
Ali leads the business and is consistently the voice for the human side of IT: technology only works if the people using it understand it and actually like it. Systems that get worked around are systems that failed, whatever the uptime report says.
LinkedIn: profile link for Ali Mirkarimi is not published yet
Safety-side advisors
- What they do
- Translate between the plant and the technology. They run the free assessment, walk your site, sit in on customer questionnaires and audits, and build the readiness plan.
- When you'd talk to them
- At the assessment. When a customer sends a security questionnaire. When you're preparing for a review, planning a shutdown, adding a line, or working out what to do first with a limited budget. Members get them as advisors on call.
- What qualifies them
- Time on plant floors, not just in server rooms. Working knowledge of shifts, changeovers, batch records, maintenance windows and contractor access, plus the IT and governance side. They know what a "no" costs you on a Friday afternoon.
Client success
- What they do
- Own the relationship. Run the scheduled check-ins and strategy meetings, keep service documentation current, track what was promised against what was delivered, and chase things inside our organization so you don't have to.
- When you'd talk to them
- On a regular cadence, by design, not only when something breaks. Also for a straight answer about billing, scope, a timeline or an escalation. If you've had to explain the same thing twice, that's their problem to fix.
- What qualifies them
- Service management experience and a bias toward telling you bad news early. KTI's model is scheduled check-ins rather than a ticket-only relationship; this group is what makes that real.
Field technicians
- What they do
- Show up. Install and repair hardware, run and terminate cable, mount access points, swap failed switches and drives, set up new lines and new sites, and deal with dust, heat, cold, wash-down, vibration, forklifts and a ceiling 40 feet up.
- When you'd talk to them
- When something needs a person on site: an install, a fit-out, a site survey, a hardware failure, a new line, a move. Also during the assessment, when somebody has to actually open the cabinet.
- What qualifies them
- Manufacturer-recognised hardware and networking certifications, plus the site-safety credentials your plant requires. They arrive with their own PPE, sign in at your gate and take your induction like any other contractor.
Network & infrastructure engineers
- What they do
- Design and maintain the thing everything else sits on. Segmentation between office and production, firewalls and controlled paths, Wi-Fi that survives steel racking, failover connectivity so one carrier outage doesn't stop shipping, servers, storage and cloud infrastructure.
- When you'd talk to them
- When you're adding capacity, opening a site, replacing aging kit, separating production from office, or fixing the dead spot that keeps knocking scanners offline in aisle 14.
- What qualifies them
- Enterprise-grade design experience applied at plant scale and plant budget. The relevant part is judgement: knowing which enterprise practices transfer to a 60-person plant and which are just expensive. See network & infrastructure.
Security operations, at arm's length
- What they do
- Watch. 24/7 monitoring, threat detection, investigation and incident response, delivered by Cyrebro: an independent security operations centre, not by us.
- When you'd talk to them
- During an incident, and in the reporting that follows. Day to day you shouldn't need to. That's the point.
- Why it's deliberate
- The people who build and run your network should not be the only people watching it. Your safety program already works this way: the internal committee isn't the last word, an external auditor verifies. We keep the same separation: we build and operate, Cyrebro monitors and reports independently, to you as well as to us. Full explanation on cyber resilience.
- What qualifies them
- A dedicated SOC staffed around the clock by analysts who do nothing else, at a scale no mid-sized MSP could staff internally and no 60-person plant could ever hire.
Development & AI
- What they do
- Build the things that don't come in a box. Integrations between systems that won't talk to each other, small applications that replace a paper form or an unmaintainable spreadsheet, reporting that pulls from more than one system, and practical automation: including AI where it earns its place, and honestly where it doesn't.
- When you'd talk to them
- When you've described a problem three times and the answer keeps being "there's no product for that." Also when somebody is about to buy an AI tool and you want a straight opinion first. See software & AI.
- What qualifies them
- Software engineering discipline plus the context to know that anything they build has to survive a shift change, an untrained user and a bad network day.
The SafeIT team
The roles above are how the team is actually organised, and who you would deal with for what. Named profiles and photographs go up as each person joins the SafeIT team.
Advisors on call
One of the things membership includes is advisors on call: a named group you can bring a question to without a quote attached.
Trade associations have run this model for decades: you join, and when something comes up you call someone who knows your industry. Most plants have nobody to ask. The part-time IT person has no peer, and the plant manager gets a vendor pitch instead of an answer.
What members use it for: reviewing a customer's security questionnaire, sanity-checking a quote from another vendor, working out whether an old machine can safely be connected, deciding what to do first on a limited budget, and preparing for an audit. No meter running, and no sales call attached.
See member benefits or join.
We're hiring
If you've worked in a plant and moved into IT, or worked in IT and always got on best with the industrial clients, you're the profile we're short of. We hire across all six groups above, in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.
We look for people who explain things without condescending, who treat a 1998 machine as a constraint rather than evidence of failure, and who know that "it can wait until Monday" is sometimes true and sometimes very expensive.
Send us your background → get in touch and pick "Careers".
What this means for your plant Six groups of people, one number, and a named advisor you can call for free. Security monitoring is deliberately separate from the team that builds your network. The delivery team is KTI's: running since 2010, not staffing up on your account.
Book a free assessment → /membership/join/#assessment