Senior managerial post comes with ‘minimum assignment duration’ of three years 

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The Cabinet Office is offering an annual salary of close to £120,000 in a bid to recruit a chief technology officer to lead the department’s IT strategy until at least 2026.

The central department is seeking a senior manager to define and implement and organisation-wide tech strategy that should be “focused on engineering, technology and architecture”. The post also comes with the responsibility of establishing within the Cabinet Office a dedicated Technical Design Authority to help shape the department’s IT estate. 

The job advert specifies that the successful candidate, who will report to the department’s chief digital and information officer, will be appointed for “a minimum assignment duration of three years”. 

Such a stipulation is “the period of time a senior civil servant is expected to remain in the same post to enable them to deliver on the agreed key business outcomes”.  

The department added that this requirement is “an expectation only; it is not something which is written into your terms and conditions”. The specification of a minimum assignment length “would not preclude” the appointee taking maternity or paternity leave, for example, and both they and the department “are not bound by” the expectation, according to the Cabinet Office.

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The CTO, who will sit at the head of the organisation’s workforce of engineering and architecture professionals, will be expected to play a central role in the “management and decommissioning of legacy systems” across the department. A wider remit of “managing technical risk” will encompass considerations of “technical debt, product supportability, scalability” and other issues. 

The department is seeking candidates with experience of “setting up and managing a large engineering, technology and architecture team in a complex, regulated environmental”, as well as “designing and building complex, high-volume, transactional digital services”.

The job advert indicates that the salary “will be dependent on your qualifications, knowledge and the relevant experience you are able to offer – but is expected to be in the range £100,000 and £117,800”, with no additional allowances or bonuses on offer.

Applicants have until 11.55pm on 4 September to submit their CV and a “statement of suitability” of up to 1,250 words. Shortlisted candidates will first be asked to participate in an assessment process, before a panel interview which is slated to take place in early October.

“There has been in the last few years an ever-increasing dependency on technology, more advanced cyber-detection and -prevention systems and more efficient transfer of data between government departments,” the job advert said. “This role will deliver the CTO function to the Cabinet Office and its agencies and will provide advice and assurance on digital, data and technology matters to a range of arm’s-length bodies aligned to the Cabinet Office.”

It added: “The portfolio of Cabinet Office is broad and complex. Complex stakeholder management is a key part of this role as well as the ability to work with commercial partners. There are a number of change programmes underway to provide replacement or new capabilities, this is a leadership role working to transform the Cabinet Office using digital data and technology.”