Department for Science, Innovation and Technology
Finance Business Manager
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Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, London, Manchester
Job Summary
The AI Security Institute (AISI) is the largest team in a government dedicated to understanding AI capabilities and risks in the world.
Our mission is to equip governments with an empirical understanding of the safety of advanced AI systems. We conduct research to understand the capabilities and impacts of advanced AI, and develop and test risk mitigations. We focus on risks with security implications, including the potential of AI to assist with the development of chemical and biological weapons, how it can be used to carry out cyber-attacks, enable crimes such as fraud, and the possibility of loss of control.
The risks from AI are not sci-fi, they are urgent. By combining the agility of a tech start-up with the expertise and mission-driven focus of government, we’re building a unique and innovative organisation to prevent AI’s harms from impeding its potential.
Job Description
Our Finance team is the operational backbone that enables our researchers and policy experts to keep pace with the speed of AI development. This is a rare opportunity to shape how one of the most ambitious organisations in government actually runs its operations and approaches financial challenges.
We are building a high performing finance team that can transform traditional government finance operations into streamlined, efficient processes and support senior leaders with critical business planning and insights to enable us to deliver against our mission. Every purchase AISI makes runs through us, whether that is compute, new hires or research collaborations. To support this at the pace AISI needs, we think carefully about the best-in-class tools we use to do our jobs (e.g. Airtable, Claude Cowork) and find creative ways to maximise the impact of every £ AISI spends.
The Finance Business Manager will own a portfolio of AISI business areas, acting as the primary finance contact for stakeholders and delivering a high-quality operational finance service. The postholder will be responsible for financial management across their portfolio, ensuring strong financial control, accurate financial reporting, effective forecasting and excellent customer service.
This role is right for you if you enjoy taking ownership, solving complex problems and improving how things work. You will act as a trusted adviser to frontier AI researchers and policy makers, a subject matter expert on purchase-to-pay processes, and work closely with colleagues across Finance, Commercial, Grants and Digital teams to ensure AISI has efficient, well-controlled and scalable finance processes.
This is an opportunity to play a key role in one of AISI's core operational functions, helping drive service excellence, strong financial control and continuous improvement across the organisation.
We Expect You To:
- Own a portfolio of AISI business areas, building trusted relationships across the organisation.
- Provide high-quality financial advice, reporting and analysis to support effective decision-making, budget management and forecasting.
- Act as the Finance Team's subject matter expert for purchase-to-pay processes, ensuring a high-quality service and strong financial control environment.
- Deliver accurate month-end activities, including journals, accruals and prepayments, ensuring financial information is reliable and supported by a robust audit trail.
- Drive continuous improvement by identifying opportunities to simplify processes, strengthen controls and improve the stakeholder experience. This might include setting up Airtable automations or designing a new finance reporting dashboard.
- Collaborate effectively with colleagues across Finance, Commercial, Grants and Digital teams to deliver efficient and scalable finance services.
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What You'll Be Doing
- Manage an assigned portfolio of business areas, providing day-to-day finance support and guidance to stakeholders.
- Represent Finance in portfolio and workstream meetings, providing financial insight, challenge and support to decision-making.
- Oversee the end-to-end purchase-to-pay process, including requisitions, purchase orders, receipting and supplier payment issues.
- Review and resolve complex finance queries received through the Finance mailbox.
- Produce financial reports, management information and analysis to support forecasting, budget monitoring and decision-making.
- Deliver month-end activities including accruals, prepayments, journals and reconciliations.
- Monitor expenditure, commitments and forecast positions, identifying risks and escalating issues where appropriate.
- Ensure transactions are accurately coded, appropriately evidenced and supported by a clear audit trail.
- Develop finance guidance and deliver training to colleagues across AISI.
- Work with Central Finance, Commercial, Grants and Digital teams to improve processes, reporting and controls.
Person specification
Essential Criteria
- Experience working in a finance, finance operations, business management or similar role within a complex organisation.
- Strong understanding of purchase-to-pay processes, including requisitions, purchase orders, receipting, invoice management and supplier payments.
- Experience using Oracle or similar financial systems to manage financial transactions, reporting and financial controls.
- Experience producing financial reports, management information and analysis to support budgeting, forecasting and decision-making.
- Knowledge of month-end accounting activities, including journals, accruals, prepayments and reconciliations.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a high level of attention to detail.
- Ability to build effective relationships and communicate financial information clearly to both finance and non-finance stakeholders.
Desirable Criteria
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Experience working within government finance or the wider public sector.
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Experience developing guidance, delivering training or coaching colleagues.
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Experience using reporting, workflow or automation tools such as Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate or Airtable.
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Knowledge of government finance controls and governance requirements, such as Managing Public Money or Consolidated Budgeting Guidance.
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Working towards, or holding, a relevant accounting qualification.
Behaviours
We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:
- Managing a Quality Service
- Delivering at Pace
- Communicating and Influencing
Salary and Benefits
Alongside your salary of £44,620, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £12,926 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology offers a competitive mix of benefits including:
- A culture of flexible working, such as job sharing, homeworking and compressed hours.
- Automatic enrolment into the Civil Service Pension Scheme, with an employer contribution of 28.97%.
- A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by 1 day per year up to a maximum of 30.
- An extensive range of learning & professional development opportunities, which all staff are actively encouraged to pursue.
- Access to a range of retail, travel and lifestyle employee discounts.
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Office Attendance
The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.
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
This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Experience.
As part of the application process you will be asked to complete a CV and personal statement. Further details around what this will entail are listed on the application form.
Please use your personal statement (in no more than 750 words) to tell us why your skills best fit this role.
In the event of a large number of applicants, applications will be sifted on CV only.
The interview will consist of 3 stages
- Interview 1: Short screening interview to understand your motivation to join AISI
- Interview 2: Presentation task, behaviours questions and scenario-based question
- Interview 3: Senior interview panel
Sift and interview dates to be confirmed.
Further Information
Former DSIT recruitment campaigns are continuing as usual, but candidates should be aware that following the Government’s announcement on the changes to some civil service departments, roles will be subject to the machinery of government moves and will ultimately be in one of the new departments. We will provide more information if you are selected for a role. This work remains of high importance to the civil service, and we thank you for your continued interest.
Reasonable Adjustment
We are proud to be a disability confident leader and we welcome applications from disabled candidates and candidates with long-term conditions.
Information about the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) and some examples of adjustments that we offer to disabled candidates and candidates with long-term health conditions during our recruitment process can be found in our DSIT Candidate Guidance. A DSIT Plain Text Version of the guidance is also available.
We encourage candidates to discuss their adjustment needs by emailing the job contact which can be found under the contact point for applicants section.
If you are experiencing accessibility problems with any attachments on this advert, please contact the email address in the 'Contact point for applicants' section.
If successful and transferring from another Government Department a criminal record check may be carried out.
New entrants are expected to join on the minimum of the pay band.
A location based reserve list of successful candidates will be kept for 12 months. Should another role become available within that period you may be offered this position.
Candidates who meet the minimum benchmark may be placed on a Reserve List for consideration for similar roles, including those at a lower grade. Candidates who narrowly miss the benchmark and are
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