Chief Technology Officer; CTO

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Annual Salary: $ + Full State Employee Benefits

Job-Related travel is occasional. Must possess a valid driver’s license and maintain required car insurance.

Bachelor’s degree plus six (6) years of relevant professional experience, including three (3) years in a supervisory or administrative capacity, or an equivalent combination of education and experience, consistent with OKDHS executive classification standards.

The strongest candidates will bring 8 or more years leading technical teams in complex government or large-scale service delivery environments, with a proven track record of conducting rapid assessments and delivering concrete improvements within compressed time frames. Public sector experience, particularly within health and human services, is strongly preferred. Experience with systems serving vulnerable populations such as Medicaid, SNAP, or child welfare is a plus.

The Chief Technology Officer is an senior leadership role responsible for directing, overseeing, and managing OKDHS’s enterprise technology functions to ensure operational continuity, regulatory compliance, and measurable service outcomes. This role has a mandate to assess current systems, deliver specific improvements, and build organizational capacity for sustained digital service delivery. Operating with broad administrative and technical discretion to plan, develop, and organize all phases of OKDHS technology work within established state and federal guidelines, the CTO collaborates with agency and State IT leadership to advance secure, modern, and user-centered digital service delivery.

• Technology teams that are healthy, accountable, and clear on their priorities, with team leaders who understand their roles, opportunities, and gaps, and who can translate technical realities into decisions.
• A technology roadmap that is actively maintained, tied to agency strategy, and used to make prioritization decisions across the current project backlog.
• Measurable progress on agency-identified priority programs, including reduction of the SNAP error rate, as an early proof point of delivery discipline.
• A prioritization framework in place so that leadership can make defensible decisions about which of the competing projects advance and which wait.
• Improve visibility into technology spending, vendor value, and investment tradeoffs so OKDHS leadership can make informed decisions about where to stabilize, defer, or accelerate work.

• Ensure technology initiatives deliver measurable improvements for frontline staff, partners, and clients, reducing administrative burden and improving service access, with particular focus on priority programs including SNAP error rate reduction and child welfare information systems (CWIS) improvement.
• Oversee vendor performance with an emphasis on outcomes, usability, and delivery of working solutions; identify procurement or contractual quick wins and negotiate vendor performance improvements where delivery has fallen short.
• Embed product- and user-centered thinking into technology planning and delivery across OKDHS programs, setting delivery standards for internal and vendor teams including agile practices, release management, and quality assurance.
• Build confidence in data quality and transparency, clearly communicating where data is reliable for operational and policy decisions and where it is not.
• Focus implementation efforts on reducing frontline burden, improving service execution, and producing measurable gains in priority program outcomes.

• Serve as the senior-most technology leader for OKDHS, providing direction and oversight to technology directors and senior managers; establish clear role boundaries, accountability, and escalation paths across the technology organization.
• Lead and develop OKDHS technology leadership and teams, fostering accountability, clarity of roles, and continuous improvement. Focus on building leaders who understand their roles, prioritize effectively, and…