Chief Technology Officer, Home Office Digital
Job summary
As the most senior technology leader within Home Office Digital, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) will shape and deliver the department’s technology strategy, ensuring modern, secure, and innovative solutions across one of the UK’s most complex digital landscapes. Reporting to the Chief Digital, Data and Technology Officer, you will provide vision, direction, and assurance for all technology spend and enterprise architecture, while championing innovation and best practice.
This role spans every Home Office mission from Migration and Border Security to Passports, Civil Registration, National Policing, and Homeland Security, supporting services that impact millions of people every year. You will oversee an IT estate of more than 600 systems, enabling critical services such as:
- 13 million Electronic Travel Authorisations since launch
- 3 million visa applications annually
- 130 million border checks each year
- 7 million passport applications annually
- 140 million police checks on people, vehicles, and property
Leading a function of approximately 650 professionals across 20+ UK locations, with seven direct reports, you will manage an annual budget of £100m. This is a leadership role of exceptional criticality and complexity, requiring strategic digital leadership experience at significant scale, and the ability to collaborate across government and industry.
As part of the Home Office Digital Senior Management Team, you will play a pivotal role in delivering the Home Office 2030 Digital Strategy, ensuring technology underpins national security and public trust as we continue to deliver across our missions.
Job description
Key responsibilities include:
The CTO is the Home Office’s senior technical leader, responsible for shaping and delivering the department’s digital vision. Acting as principal advisor to senior stakeholders, the CTO drives alignment of technology strategy, architecture, and standards across all business areas. Leading the CTO function and championing innovation, the role ensures robust governance, technical authority, and enterprise architecture, positioning the Home Office at the forefront of digital transformation.
The Job Holder will be expected to:
- Strategic Leadership and Advisory
In this role, you will serve as the most senior technical and strategic advisor to the Chief Digital, Data and Technology Officer, ExCo members, and other senior stakeholders. You will provide leadership and coordination across Home Office Digital and the CTO community, ensuring technology direction and standards remain consistent throughout all areas. Additionally, you will represent the Home Office at senior technology forums across government, influencing cross-government technology strategies and standards.
- Technology Strategy and Architecture
You will create, maintain, and deliver the Home Office 2030 Digital Strategy while shaping future strategies beyond 2030 to ensure alignment with business architecture and organisational objectives. This includes developing and maintaining enterprise architecture and technology roadmaps to support strategic and business planning. You will lead the department’s Technical Design Authority and governance processes, ensuring robust decision-making and compliance with agreed standards. Furthermore, you will establish and enforce technical standards, policies, and architectural coherence across all programmes, driving adoption of cross-government and Home Office technology codes of practice.
- Operational Oversight and Delivery
You will be accountable for outcomes delivered by the Home Office Digital CTO function, which includes Architecture, Quality Assurance, Audit, Innovation & Automation Centres (including Artificial Intelligence oversight), and major elements of Digital Transformation.
Your responsibilities will include ensuring IT procurements comply with technical standards and target state architectures, developing and maintaining technology strategy, roadmaps, and preferred products, and ensuring architectural coherence and convergence of the Home Office enterprise architecture. You will also oversee and manage departmental technical debt, particularly in areas representing future obsolescence and resilience risks.
As the senior technical leader in the department, you will be required to oversee and provide senior accountability into programmes or onto programme boards, this includes SRO responsibilities for some of our critical Home Office Digital platforms and services underpinning the departments strategy and mission.
- Innovation and Emerging Technologies
You will champion innovation and emerging technologies, fostering a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement to deliver transformative solutions for departmental operations. Maintaining detailed knowledge of best practice, technologies, architectures, and emerging trends will be essential to ensure the Home Office remains at the forefront of digital innovation.
You will oversee the assurance, experimentation, and co-ordination of the department's investment in AI across all operational and Home Office Digital implementations. Supporting innovation, you will make sure that the team continue to be exemplars across government in the safe use of AI through thought leadership, targeted delivery intervention, expertise into wider departmental activities and early-stage experimentation and use of novel technologies. As well as AI you will also continue to deliver multi-million-pound benefits through use of Automation and continued delivery of ‘citizen developer’ services, increasingly supporting a more digitally capable business to deliver small scale services close to operations.
- Professional Leadership and Capability Development
As Head of Profession for architects, you will provide professional leadership, mentoring, and direction to the group. You will cultivate best practice for system design, development, integration, and data management while optimising systems and workflows to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.
Person specification
Essential Criteria
The role requires a leader with the credibility and influence to engage senior stakeholders and drive consensus across the department, wider government and industry. Strong communication skills are vital, with the ability to simplify complexity and inspire change. The individual must combine strategic vision with attention to detail, commercial acumen, and resilience under pressure, while providing inspiring leadership to build and develop high-performing teams.
The successful candidate will need to demonstrate their knowledge, experience, capability and behavioural approach to a high standard against the following key criteria:
- Extensive senior‑level experience leading digital and technology functions in large, complex organisations, setting future‑focused roadmaps informed by horizon scanning and delivering high‑transaction, user‑centred services across legacy and modern systems.
- Proven ability to shape and implement IT and Digital strategies, securing buy‑in and delivering measurable outcomes in environments with competing priorities, significant risk, and organisational complexity.
- Strong technology background with a deep understanding of enterprise and solutions architecture, engineering delivery practices, tooling, automation, and AI. Evidence of applying this expertise to generate quantifiable business benefits while maintaining architectural coherence.
- Ability to convey and embed a persuasive future vision, inspiring confidence and commitment at all levels, and attracting, retaining, and developing diverse talent to create an inclusive, high-performing organisation.
- Exceptional communicator able to explain complex technical concepts clearly, influence high‑stakes decisions, and build consensus across Ministers, cross‑government partners, senior leaders, and suppliers.
- Evidence of managing significant budgets and applying innovative, highly strategic approaches to sourcing services efficiently, combining in-house delivery capability with multi-vendor supply contracts under conditions of high accountability.
Desirable Skills
- Cyber Security and Risk Management - Knowledge of secure-by-design principles, regulatory compliance, and risk management in large-scale technology environments.
- Emerging Technologies - Awareness of cutting-edge technologies such as cloud-native architectures, AI/ML, and automation, and experience in assessing their applicability to large-scale enterprise environments.
- Understanding of the public sector - Understanding of the public sector including government structures, policy environments, and delivery models.
Benefits
Alongside your salary of £120,000, Home Office contributes £34,764 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.- Learning and development tailored to your role
- An environment with flexible working options
- A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
- A Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%
Things you need to know
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.Selection process details
Online Application
Please submit your application to HO-CTO@global-resourcing.com no later than 23:55hrs on Monday 15th June 2026.
- A CV - setting out your career history, highlighting specific responsibilities and achievements that are relevant for this role, including details where budgets and numbers of people managed, relevant achievements in recent posts, together with reasons for any gaps within the last two years;
- A Statement of Suitability – (limited to 1250 words) explaining how you consider your personal skills, qualities and experience, provide evidence of your suitability for the role, with particular reference to the essential criteria in the person specification.
- Diversity Monitoring - as part of the online application process, you will be asked a number of diversity-related questions. If you do not wish to provide a declaration on any of the characteristics, you will have the option to select 'prefer not to say'. See the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy: 2022 to 2025 (HTML) - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) for more information.
It is essential that in your written application you give evidence, using specific examples, of proven experience. These responses will be developed and discussed with the candidates invited for interview. Failure to submit both a CV and Supporting Statement will mean the panel only have limited information on which to assess your application against the criteria in the person specification.
Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.This role has a minimum assignment duration of 3 years. An assignment duration 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 assignment duration also supports your career through building your depth of expertise.
As part of accepting this role you will be agreeing to the expected assignment duration set out above. This will not result in a contractual change to your terms and conditions. Please note this is an expectation only, it is not something which is written into your terms and conditions or indeed which the employing organisation or you are bound by. It will depend on your personal circumstances at a particular time and business needs, for example, would not preclude any absence like family friendly leave. It is nonetheless an important expectation, which is why we ask you to confirm you agree to the assignment duration set out above.
Security
Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check (opens in a new window).See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.
Nationality requirements
This job is broadly open to the following groups:
- UK nationals
- nationals of the Republic of Ireland
- nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
- individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
- Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service
Working for the Civil Service
The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window).The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.
Diversity and Inclusion
The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see theCivil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).Apply and further information
This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans (opens in a new window) initiative.Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.Contact point for applicants
Job contact :
- Name : Global Resourcing
- Email : HO-CTO@global-resourcing.com
Recruitment team
- Email : scsrecruitment@homeoffice.gov.uk
Further information
he Commission publishes a guide that outlines its approach to handling a complaint under the Recruitment Principles. This can be accessed at http://civilservicecommission.independent.gov.uk/civil-service-recruitm…. We would recommend you read this guidance before submitting a complaint.Complaints should be sent in writing to: Civil Service Commission, Room G8, 1 Horse Guards Road, London, SW1A 2HQ.
Follow link to apply
HO-CTO@global-resourcing.comAttachments
Candidate Pack - Chief Technology Officer Opens in new window (pdf, 602kB)Share this page
Salary range
- £120,000 - £150,000 per year