IT Support Technician in Hohenwald, Tennessee at Highland Energy

The better you get at this job, the less of this job there is.

That's not a gimmick. It's the actual deal, and it's the whole reason this role is interesting.

We run a corporate office, a fleet of Fast Stop convenience stores, a fuel transport company, and a network of dealer sites across Tennessee. Every one of those places has technology in it that has to work: point-of-sale registers, fuel dispensers, tank gauges buried under the concrete, firewalls, PC’s, tablets, cameras, switches, phones, printers, door locks, the menu board over the deli counter. When something goes down, a customer can't buy fuel, or lunch, or a cup of coffee — and they go somewhere else. That's the job, underneath all of it.

Today, keeping that running means driving. A lot of it. We won't pretend otherwise — you will spend real time in a vehicle, on a ladder, and on your knees behind a register with a flashlight in your teeth.

But here's what we're actually hiring for.

The person who does this job well doesn't just fix the register. They ask why the register broke, notice it's the fourth time this quarter, and go kill the reason.

(Sometimes the reason is a person. We're going to need you to use words for that one.)

They get tired of driving two hours to press a key, so they help us put a remote KVM on the thing and never drive it again. They automate the check they're sick of doing manually. And every problem they solve at the root is a trip they never have to take.

That earned time is where the good stuff lives. We want you off the road and in the office — building, scripting, designing, breaking things in the lab. Not because the field work doesn't matter, but because you got so good at it that it stopped needing you.

Why any of this matters

We're in the business of customer experience. That's not a poster in the breakroom — it's the actual strategy, and it's the thing we care about most.

A customer pulls in, and in the next four minutes they form an opinion of us. Did the pump work on the first try? Did the card reader take their card, or did it take three tries and a reboot? Was the deli menu lit up, or was it a black screen? Did the register line move? Every one of those is a piece of technology. Every one of them is yours.

You will rarely be the one standing across the counter from the customer. You will always be the reason their four minutes went well or went badly.

So we're going to say the unglamorous part out loud: we don't care about your title, and neither should you. If the line is backing up and you're standing there, you jump on a register. If there's trash in the lot, you pick it up on the way in — not because anyone's watching, but because that's our lot, and the customer is about to see it. If somebody needs a hand, you help.

If that reads as beneath you, this is the wrong company. If it reads as obvious, keep going.

What's actually in the sandbox

We're a mid-size company, which means you will not be assigned a lane and told to stay in it. There's no tier-2 to escalate to. There's the IT Director and there's you. Whatever's broken, you'll be in it — and whatever you want to build, there's nobody stopping you.

Some of what's live right now:

• A fleet of Raspberry Pis — dozens of them — pulling information over a mesh network and importing them into our ERP every night, replacing a manual process nobody misses. More Pis run the digital menu boards over our deli counters.
• An AI agent connected to systems that reads alarms, decides what's urgent, and dispatches work orders on its own.
• Windows and Linux servers in our office running the business — domain services, our automation stack, our containerized apps, the server that talks to the tank gauges. You'll learn both. Fluently.
• A full Microsoft environment — Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Active Directory, Azure, licensing, identity, security policy. If you've never administered it, you will. If you have, there's plenty here to make better.
• Our ERP — every gallon, every transaction, every dollar this company moves lands in a database. We pull from it constantly, and we're building it out in SQL, Power BI, and Microsoft Fabric so executives can actually see the business.
• PCs, Tablets, Firewalls, switches, and Wi-Fi at every location, plus VoIP, POTS, ISP circuits, cameras, tank gauges, dispensers, and a dozen other things that all speak different protocols and all think they're the most important device on the network.

You will not be bored. We're a fuel company, and half of what we run looks more like a startup's infrastructure than a gas station's.

Here's the part worth noticing: nobody was assigned most of that. The Pi fleet and the AI Agents didn't come down from a strategy meeting. They started as somebody's hunch that there had to be a better way, and now they run the business. Which brings us to the next part.

This job has doors in it

Here's the part most postings don't offer, and we mean it literally.

Once you've got your feet under you, you get real, protected time to chase things you're curious about — as long as there's a plausible way it makes Highland better. Not "if there's downtime." Allotted. On purpose.

We're not being generous. We're being selfish: everything good we've built came out of exactly that, and we'd like more of it.

So — the list above is what the last couple of years produced. The next one is yours, and where it goes depends entirely on what you're into:

If data is your thing — our ERP is a gold mine and we've barely scratched it. Fuel margins, store performance, customer behavior, freight. Learn SQL, learn Power BI and Fabric, and go find the thing nobody knew was true. Some of what we've built this way now goes straight to the executive team.

If cyber security is your thing — go find our holes. Seriously. Firewalls, identity, endpoints, dozens of sites and a fleet of remote devices, payment infrastructure, a honeypot on the network. There is more surface here than one person can cover, and we would rather you find the vulnerability than someone else.

If AI is your thing — we're already running agents in production against real systems, and we are nowhere near done. There are a dozen manual processes in this company that shouldn't be manual. If you can see them and kill them, that work is yours.

If infrastructure is your thing — design it. Server, network, or fleet, if you can make the case that there's a better way, you get to build the better way.

We're not going to promise you a title track. We're promising you something rarer: the room to become good at something, on the clock, and a company small enough that you'll see the result of it.

Who this is for

Read these honestly. If several of them land, we want to hear from you.

• You have a homelab, or a Linux server doing something dumb in a closet, or a server rack you absolutely did not need to buy.
• You have, at some point, taken apart something that was working fine just to see how it worked.
• When something breaks in a way you don't understand, your first feeling is curiosity, not dread.
• You didn't get into technology because it looked like a stable career. You got into it because you couldn't leave it alone.
• You have opinions about things nobody asked you about.
• You've gone down a rabbit hole recently — a video, a forum, a project — and come out the other side knowing something genuinely useless and genuinely interesting.
• You'd pick up trash in the parking lot on your way in, and you'd jump on a register if the line was long, and you wouldn't think either one was a story worth telling afterward.
• You can talk to a store clerk having the worst day of her week without making them feel stupid.
• You're resourceful. When you hit a wall you've never seen before, you find the way through it instead of waiting for someone to hand you one.

That last one is the whole job, honestly. Nobody here is going to know the answer either.

What we don't care about

Your degree. Have one, don't have one — it is great for conversation, but not required.

Your certifications. They're the least interesting thing on your resume. We'd rather hear about the thing you built in your garage.

Your years of experience. If you're experienced, great — come in and have an impact on day one. If you're early and you're hungry and you're the kind of person who teaches yourself things because you can't help it, we will absolutely take you.

What you don't know yet. You will encounter systems here you've never touched. So has everyone. That's not a gap — that's Tuesday.

Who this is not for

We'd rather tell you now than waste your time.

• If you want a clean lane and a clear ticket queue and a manager who tells you what to do next, this will make you miserable.
• If you need a team of eight and an escalation path, we don't have one.
• If technology is what you do from 8 to 5 and never think about again — that's a completely respectable way to live, and it's not this job.
• If "that's not my job" is a sentence you've said out loud, we're not going to work.
• If you're picturing a clean, cold server room, adjust. Our stores are well-kept — cleaner than most — but a gas station is a gas station. You'll be on the floor behind a fountain machine, in a cabinet under a register, on a ladder near a fryer, outside at a dispenser in January. It's grease, dust, and weather. You will go home some days smelling like fried chicken. That is not a metaphor.

The honest downsides

Stuff breaks at inconvenient times. Some of our sites are two hours away and it is never a convenient hour. There is real grunt work in this role — cable management, hardware swaps, running the same check on twenty stores. Some of the technology you'll inherit is old, and some of it is held together with duct tape and hope, and you will be the one who finds out where.

We're telling you this because the person we want reads that and thinks okay, so what do I fix first.

You made it this far.

That's most of what we needed to know. Now we need two things from you.

First, a resume — a real one. We want your work history: where you've been, what you did there, how long you stayed. We're a small team and we are going to lean on you hard. Experience is how we land on a number — experience is worth paying for, and the range moves with it.

Curiosity gets you in the door here. Dependability is what keeps the lights on. We need both, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

Second — and this is the part we read first:

In a few sentences, tell us about something technical you built, broke, or figured out that nobody asked you to.

It doesn't have to be impressive. It doesn't have to be work-related. It can be a Pi that tells you when the mail comes, a router you flashed, a script that scrapes something stupid, a car computer you reverse-engineered, a game server you ran for your friends.

We're not testing whether it's good. We're testing whether you have one.

The resume tells us whether we can count on you. The question tells us whether we want to.

If you're sitting there with an answer already forming — apply.

The practical stuff

Reports to: IT Director
Location: Hohenwald, TN (corporate office) + travel
Compensation: $40,000 – $60,000, depending on experience
Schedule: Full-time. Occasional after-hours and on-call when something's down.
Travel: Regular travel to our stores and dealer sites across Tennessee. Valid driver's license and a clean driving record required.
Physical: You'll lift equipment, use a ladder, kneel and crouch in tight spaces, and work outdoors at the forecourt in whatever weather Tennessee is having that day. Store environments include food-service and fuel areas — expect grease, dust, and the occasional mess.
Also required: Background check. Everything else, we'll teach you.