Department for Science, Innovation and Technology
Head of Finance and Business Services
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London, Manchester
Job Summary
The AI Security Institute (AISI) is the largest team in any government dedicated to understanding advanced AI capabilities and risks. Our mission is to equip governments with an empirical understanding of the safety of advanced AI systems.
We’re at the heart of the UK government with direct lines to No. 10, and we work with frontier developers and governments globally. We combine the agility of a tech start-up with the expertise and mission-driven focus of government to build a unique and innovative organisation — so that AI’s harms don’t impede its potential.
With our resources, unique agility and international influence, AISI is the best place to shape both AI development and government action.
Job Description
Primary objective: Lead and scale AISI’s Finance and Grants functions, alongside other core business services, to build the highest performing teams of their kind in government, ensuring significant public resources are deployed effectively to maximise AISI’s impact.
The Head of Finance and Business Services is a senior leader in Talent & Operations, operating as a strategic partner to the Deputy Director for Talent & Operations and to AISI’s wider leadership. You will set the vision, standards and metrics for both teams, hold a high bar for quality and detail, and relentlessly collect and act on feedback from the people your teams serve.
Few roles offer the opportunity to influence both internal. Few roles offer responsibility and impact at this scale. You will help decide where significant public funding goes, shape AISI’s priorities, support world leading research and influence how the UK builds capability in one of the defining technologies of our time.
There is no single prescribed methodology. You will bring high-agency behaviours, take the initiative to generate momentum, and design the operating model that best fits AISI’s fast-moving environment.
What You’ll Be Doing:
- Lead, coach and develop the Finance and Grants teams, setting clear direction, standards and metrics, and building a culture of growth, ownership and continuous improvement.
- Set an ambitious vision for both functions and define what excellent looks like, establishing service standards, KPIs and review rhythms that make AISI’s finance and grants operations a benchmark across government.
- Be relentlessly customer-service obsessed: systematically gather feedback from researchers, leaders, suppliers and awardees, and iterate on processes so their experience improves measurably over time.
- Act as a senior adviser on financial strategy and resource allocation, helping AISI’s senior leadership make informed decisions in a rapidly evolving environment.
- Own financial grip and assurance across AISI: expenditure and forecast tracking, business planning advice to senior leaders, the procure-to-pay pathway, and strong relationships with other finance teams in government.
- Own AISI’s grants strategy and delivery: the forward pipeline, scheme design, governance and awardee experience, ensuring significant public funding is deployed quickly, credibly and effectively.
- Identify where funding, grants, partnerships and operational investment can accelerate progress on AISI’s mission, designing interventions that deliver measurable impact.
- Drive systems improvement and automation across both teams, leveraging technology, automation and AI-enabled workflows to increase speed, accuracy and scalability. (e.g. Oracle, forecast tooling, FlexiGrant, Airtable, low-code workflows), reducing manual effort and raising speed and accuracy.
- Provide clear reporting and briefing to senior leadership, and secure senior sponsorship and cross-government buy-in to unblock dependencies and accelerate delivery.
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Person Specification
Essential Criteria:
- High attention to detail and exceptional standards: you set a demonstrably high bar for quality across finance and grants delivery, and design the metrics and controls that hold teams to it.
- Sound financial judgement: confident overseeing core finance processes (forecasting, budgeting, spend controls, procure-to-pay) and/or grant funding at scale, and holding others to a high standard.
- Deep experience leading teams, coaching and managing your team to excel through regular feedback and development opportunities. This includes managing manager and recruiting exceptional talent into your team.
- Ambitious and high-agency: you take the initiative to set direction, generate momentum and take functions from good to best-in-class.
- Customer-service obsessed: proven approach to gathering feedback from the people you serve and iterating on processes to improve their experience.
- Strong systems thinking and analytical skills: able to identify root-cause issues and design scalable operational improvements, and comfortable working with budgets, forecasts and data.
- Strong stakeholder management and the ability to secure senior sponsorship and navigate cross-functional priorities across government or similarly complex environments.
- Motivated by AI Safety, with a sound understanding on gaps in the AI Safety environment that grants can help fill.
Desirable Criteria:
- Experience of grant-making programmes: scheme design, assessment, governance, awardee experience and monitoring.
- Experience working in or managing finance, analytics or commercial teams
- Experience working in central government
- Experience in operations in research-driven or technical organisations or start ups.
- Understanding of AI-related policy, technology or organisational risks.
- Track record of process improvement and automation using low-code tools (e.g. Airtable, Power Apps/Automate, Oracle, FlexiGrant).
Behaviours
We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:
- Seeing the Big Picture
- Delivering at Pace
- Leadership
Salary and Benefits
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.
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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.
Selection Process
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, personal statement and a behavioural statement.
CV: a CV of no more than 2 A4 pages
Personal statement: A personal statement (max: 500 words) to explain how you meet the essential criteria for this role – you should reference specific examples from your previous experience
Behavioural statement: seeing the big picture. Given what you know about AISI and the pace at which frontier AI is developing, where should AISI be directing funding over the next two years? Please cover:
- The two or three areas you would prioritise, and your reasoning
- How you would know, a year on, whether those were the right calls
Application: Sift on CV, personal statement and problem statement.
Further details around what this will entail are listed on the application form.
In the event of a large number of applicants, applications will be sifted on the CV alone.
Candidates who pass the initial sift may be progressed to a full sift, or progressed straight to assessment/interview.
Interview Process:
- Interview 1: Interview 1 (screening) Light-touch conversation focusing on experience and fit.
- Interview 2: Scenario-based exercise comprising a presentation and follow-up questions (task details will be sent before the interview).
- Interview 3: Final interview with AISI executive team.
Sift and interview dates
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.
Please be aware the levels of national security clearance are changing which may impact on the level needed for this role by the time of appointment. All efforts will be made to keep candidates informed of any changes and what that will mean in terms of vetting criteria. For more information please See our vetting charter
For further information on National Security Vetting please visit the Demystifying Vetting website.
Existing Civil Servants and applicants from accredited NDPBs are eligible to apply, and can be considered on loan basis (Civil Servants) or secondment (accredited NDPBs). Prior agreement to be released on a loan basis must be obtained before commencing the application process. In the case of Civil Servants, the terms of the loan will be agreed between the home and host department and the Civil Servant. This includes grade on return.
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