Department for Science, Innovation and Technology
Head of Business Operations
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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
About the role
This is a rare opportunity to shape how one of the most ambitious organisations in government actually runs. As Head of Business Operations you will lead the team that makes AISI run faster, smoother and better for everyone: combining an in-house Workplace Technology team of engineers with a portfolio of high stakes strategic operations projects. These teams share a single mission: find where AISI could work better and make it happen. This can mean building software and automations to drive improvements and efficiencies or taking an ambiguous org-wide problem, e.g. office structures or capabilities and driving it to solution from a blank page.
The Head of Business Operations will lead our internal Workplace Technology team, alongside a portfolio of high-importance special projects. You will manage a team of ambitious generalists, process improvement specialists, and exceptional engineers to directly influence how AISI is run and how smooth our operating environment feels for all staff.
Operating as a senior strategic partner to the Deputy Director for Talent & Operations, you will identify and analyse business operations challenges, design solutions and deliver them end-to-end. You will work closely with teams across AISI to identify friction points, prioritise the highest-value opportunities and implement scalable solutions that increase organisational efficiency.
The Role Has Two Core Areas Of Responsibility:
Workplace Technology: The Workplace Technology team's mission is to build the internal tools and automations that let AISI operate at the speed of frontier AI. Working closely with AISI's Core Tech team, researchers and process owners across the organisation, the team identifies high-value problems, builds products and automations for AISI's highest-friction workflows, and drives adoption of what it ships. Its engineers work across teams including People, Talent, Finance, Commercial and Grants, redesigning processes so that work which took days takes hours and maintaining the tools they build.
BizOps projects: You will lead a diverse portfolio of high-priority projects that deliver significant impact for AISI's staff and operating environment. This spans areas such as estates planning, organisation-wide systems and process improvement, and supporting the delivery of new technical capabilities. These projects will often cut across teams, involve significant ambiguity and require taking a problem from initial diagnosis through to implementation.
As a leader, you will build and empower a high-performing team that operates autonomously, setting direction and stepping in to unblock progress when needed, whether through strong problem-solving skills or by leveraging your networks to resolve challenges. You will also secure senior sponsorship and foster strong relationships across DSIT and wider government to support the delivery of complex change initiatives.
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The ideal candidate will bring skills in operational strategy, process improvement, systems thinking and team leadership, matched with exceptional energy, integrity and ambition for the team.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Own and iterate the organisation’s operational strategy, ensuring your team is working on the highest priority initiatives to achieve the strategies goals. You will have strong strategic takes on tooling use and process improvements that are needed to reduce friction across the organisation
- Build and empower a high-performing team that operates autonomously, stepping in to unblock progress when needed, whether through strong problem-solving skills or leveraging government networks to resolve challenges.
- Recruit, develop, and retain exceptional people: manage, coach and inspire a high-performing team. Foster a culture of growth and continuous learning, ensuring the right skills and capabilities are in place to deliver on organisational priorities.
- Lead lean operational transformation projects in a fast-paced delivery environment. Set clear scope, identify key stakeholders, establish success metrics and measure project outcomes. Gather feedback, iterate on approaches, and ensure continuous improvement throughout each project cycle.
- Strengthen organisational systems and deliver an exceptional diagnostic capability to guide your interventions, improving data-driven decision-making across operations.
- Develop clear project roadmaps with measurable milestones and provide regular progress reporting to senior leadership.
- Design, embed, and continuously improve AISI’s business operations playbook, including progress review rhythms, decision-making processes, and delivery frameworks.
Build strong cross-government relationships to unblock dependencies, secure buy-in, and accelerate delivery.
Person specification
Essential Criteria
- Operational strategy, prioritisation and transformation: Deep experience leading organisational change and operational transformation in complex, high-change environments, including setting direction, making clear trade-offs, and prioritising the most mission-critical work where there are more opportunities than the team can take on at once.
- Problem solving and senior judgement: Excellent problem-solving skills, with the ability to identify the crux of a problem from limited or imperfect information, ask the right questions, and help teams unblock effectively without creating low-value work.
- Stakeholder management and senior sponsorship: Strong stakeholder management skills, including building relationships across government or similarly complex environments, securing senior sponsorship, navigating cross-functional priorities, and using those relationships to unblock dependencies.
- People leadership: Demonstrable experience managing, developing and retaining high-performing teams with exceptional culture. You bring a proven track record of selecting, recruiting, coaching and empowering exceptional people to deliver on a clear team mission.
- Systems thinking and analytical capability: Strong systems thinking and analytical skills, with the ability to identify root causes, diagnose operational friction, and design scalable improvements that increase organisational effectiveness.
- Change management and adoption: Expertise in change management, including communication, engagement and adoption planning, with a track record of embedding new ways of working in fast-paced environments.
- Strong AI Safety motivation and organisational judgement: Strong AI Safety motivation, with good judgement about how a frontier AI Safety organisation needs to operate in order to preserve pace, quality and impact.
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Desirable criteria
- Experience working in central government.
- Experience operating in analytical, research-driven, or technical organisations.
- Exposure to agile or sprint-based delivery models.
- Understanding of AI-related policy, technology, or organisational risks.
Behaviours
We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:
- Changing and Improving
- Seeing the Big Picture
- Leadership
We only ask for evidence of these behaviours on your application form:
Changing and Improving
Alongside your salary of £69,675, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £20,184 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.
- A hybrid office/home based working model where staff will spend a norm of 40-60% of their time in the office (minimum of 40%) over a month with flex dependent on balancing business and individual need.
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.
Please use your personal statement (in no more than 500 words) to explain how you meet the essential criteria for this role. You should reference specific examples from your previous experience.
You will also need to complete a 250 behaviour statement on the following:
Changing and Improving Business Operations at AISI are the work that doesn't sit neatly with an existing team: high-importance, often ambiguous, and needing someone to drive the project through to completion. Propose three special projects you think AISI should take on in the next 12 months to advance its mission. For each, tell
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