Deputy Director Chief Technology Officer - CNO Ref. 3821

Cheltenham, Manchester

Job description

Salary, including specialist skills payment, up to £155,355 per annum subject to candidate skills assessed during recruitment.

This role is full-time and office based for 37 hours per week - flexible or compressed working patterns will be considered.

This role will be based predominantly in either Cheltenham or Manchester, with reasonable regular travel required between the two locations.

About us

GCHQ is the nation’s intelligence, cyber and security agency. We work to make the UK the safest place to live and work online; connect the national security community securely; and provide insights and counter threats through SIGINT and effects. Our people work closely with MI5 and MI6 as well as defence, international, and industry partners across a variety of locations, with major hubs in Cheltenham, London and Manchester as well as other sites in the UK and overseas.

We live by the values of ingenuity, integrity, impact and teamwork as we work to keep the UK safe, resilient and prosperous in an uncertain world. A role with us means you will do unique and challenging work in a supportive environment, making a meaningful difference to national security.

The role

Applications are sought to fill a newly created Chief Technology Officer (CTO) role for GCHQ’s Computer Network Operations (CNO).

This role provides an exciting opportunity for a CNO specialist to use their expertise to set the vision for the future of this work in GCHQ – charting a course for specialist delivery teams and shaping the direction for capability development and workforce skills for the future. GCHQ needs a combination of deep understanding and the confidence to develop new approaches and make judgements on when existing ways of working need to evolve.

GCHQ’s CNO specialists are at the cutting edge of our capabilities, operating in creative ways in hostile environments. They infiltrate computers, helping to discover vital intelligence, and discover and disrupt the plans of terrorists and criminals.

The CTO will provide the technical direction for CNO work, and work with technology teams across the intelligence community to influence the capability resilience and eventual operational impact of HMG CNO, for intelligence and effects purposes.

You will have responsibility for the CNO capabilities and for workforce technical health from recruitment through to skills development and retention. The successful candidate will have a high level of appropriate technical knowledge and experience of working in this or related fields, for example in sophisticated red teaming or ethical hacking.

Key Responsibilities:

To apply for this role, you will be a leader who:

• Has demonstrable ability to provide technical leadership, long-term strategy and direction for the team.
• Has proven success inspiring and developing high-performance, technical teams. This is a role not just for an individual contributor, but someone who can lead others and innovate.
• Is able to thrive in ambiguity and create simplicity out of complexity.
• Can demonstrate an ability to get to grips with the challenges of national security mission teams and find creative technological solutions.
• Experience in technologies designed to operate in hostile or contested environments.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is critical to our mission and we expect all our leaders to demonstrate a commitment to its delivery. To protect the UK, we need a truly diverse workforce that reflects the society we serve and therefore would like to encourage applications from a wide range of backgrounds for this role.

Senior roles within GCHQ are responsible for ensuring effective engagement with Safety, Health and Wellbeing processes, including actions related to allocating resourcing and monitoring compliance. This extends to the management of psychological risk and the nomination of an individual/individuals responsible for assessing and recording roles in the Management of Psychological Risk (MPR) tool and to lead on liaison with the Wellbeing team.

About you

You’ll be somebody who:

• Sees the bigger picture, and anticipates the long-term impact on GCHQ of economic,…