Department for Energy Security and Net Zero
Salesforce Centre of Excellence (CoE) Lead
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Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, London, Salford
Job Summary
The Integrated Corporate Services (ICS) is a shared corporate service. It provides corporate services (HR, Finance, Digital, Commercial, Security and Estates) across the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ) and the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT).
Our team of over 400 professionals will be leading the way in how these functions will be delivered in the future. Our ambition is to be the leading provider of integrated corporate services for government and set the standard for quality, efficiency, and innovation in our field.
We offer great working benefits including a world-class pension, flexible working options and a career where your learning and development is taken seriously. We are enormously proud to be a Disability Confident Leader employer. We support candidates with adjustments throughout our recruitment process. Information about disability confidence and just some examples of the adjustments that you can request can be found in the reasonable adjustment section below.
Find Out More
You can also follow our LinkedIn Careers Page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/desnz-careers/
Job Description
Join ICS Digital, where innovation meets expertise to create digital solutions. We are a cohesive digital community who work in the open, solving problems together and fostering a culture of transparency and collaboration. Our commitment to user-focused design and data-driven decision-making ensures that we deliver accessible services tailored to the needs of our customers.
We are looking for a Salesforce Centre of Excellence Lead to lead the governance, evolution, and adoption of our Salesforce capability.
Salesforce is becoming an increasingly important part of our technology landscape, supporting core business processes, service delivery, and operational teams.
This role will be accountable for the Salesforce Centre of Excellence, ensuring we invest in the right capabilities, provide appropriate governance and control, and create a scalable operating model that supports both delivery and long-term platform health.
Visit our blog to learn more about us and our work: https://icsdigital.blog.gov.uk/
To find out more about the Government Digital & Data profession visit: https://dsit.pagetiger.com/bzwfhzv/1
Person specification
CoE Vision & Strategy
- Maintain the vision, purpose, and value proposition for the Salesforce Centre of Excellence
- Establish Salesforce as a strategic platform rather than a series of disconnected projects
- Translate organisational strategy into a clear Salesforce platform direction and multi-year roadmap
- Champion the Salesforce capability internally and build confidence in the CoE model
Governance & Operating Model
- Own the operating model for the Salesforce Centre of Excellence
- Maintain clear governance, decision-making forums, and working groups
- Own the standards and guardrails for solution design, development, release, support, and change
Roadmap & Prioritisation
- Own and maintain the Salesforce platform roadmap
- Establish and run a transparent prioritisation framework for Salesforce demand
- Balance investment across:
- Platform capability and sustainability
- Business change and feature delivery
- Governance, controls, and technical improvement
- Adoption, enablement, and service improvement
- Make trade-offs visible and understood across stakeholders
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Standards, Quality & Platform Health
- Maintain standards for configuration, customisation, integration, release management, environments, support, and documentation
- Ensure consistency and quality across all Salesforce work, whether delivered internally or through suppliers
- Drive reduction in duplication, unmanaged customisation, and technical debt
- Promote reuse, simplicity, and long-term maintainability across the platform
You will also be responsible for Supplier & Delivery Oversight, Adoption & User Experience and Metrics & Value Tracking.
The above responsibilities are not exhaustive, and the post holders may be required to undertake some additional tasks not listed above, within the remit of their grade, to support the team.
Essential Criteria
- Proven leadership experience in platform governance, product leadership, or enterprise capability management
- Strong experience working with Salesforce or a comparable enterprise platform
- Experience establishing and maintaining governance, standards, and operating models across multiple teams
- Strong prioritisation and stakeholder management skills
- Experience managing demand in a complex environment with competing priorities
- Ability to make trade-offs and challenge demand constructively
- Excellent communication, leadership, and influencing skills
Desirable Criteria
- Experience establishing or leading a Centre of Excellence or similar platform function
- Experience managing third-party suppliers and delivery partners
- Experience working across product, architecture, engineering, and delivery teams
- Experience improving platform maturity, control, and long-term sustainability
It is unusual that all candidates will meet all the desirable criteria. If your skills and experience look slightly different from what we have identified and you think you can bring value to the Salesforce Centre of Excellence Lead role and the team, we strongly encourage you to apply. We'd love to hear from you!
Behaviours
We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:
- Leadership
- Managing a Quality Service
- Working Together
Technical skills
We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:
- Product management - Level: Expert
Alongside your salary of £56,900, Department for Energy Security & Net Zero contributes £16,483 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 Energy Security and Net Zero 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.
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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, Experience and Technical skills.
After submission of the first stage of your application you will be invited to complete a Civil Service Verbal Test and a Civil Service Work Strengths Test. If you successfully pass the test, you will be invited to complete the final stage of the application.
Please complete the online tests as soon as possible (within 24-48 hours is recommended), the closing date for the tests is 23:55 on 20th July 2026. If you fail to complete the online test before the deadline your application will be withdrawn. Guidance for the test will be available when you are invited to take the test. The tests are administered online and accessed via the CS Jobs website.
There Will Be Maintenance For Online Tests On Sunday, 19th July. This Means You Will Be Unable To Access The Online Tests Between
BST (London) 4pm-7pm
ET (US Eastern) 11am-2pm
Your progress will be saved, and you will be able to continue once the tests are available again.
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 500 words) to describe how your past experience relate to the essential criteria outlined in this job description, focusing on your most recent career history.
Applications will be sifted on CV and personal statement.
In the event of a large number of applicants, applications will be sifted on the personal statement only.
Candidates who pass the initial sift may be progressed to a full sift, or progressed straight to assessment/interview.
The interview will consist of behaviour and technical questions.
Interviewees will be asked to deliver a presentation; further details will be provided nearer the time.
The link to the technical/professional competency framework that candidates will be assessed against, for their reference: https://ddat-capability-framework.service.gov.uk/role/product-manager
Sift and interview dates to be confirmed.
Further Information
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 DESNZ Candidate Guidance. A DESNZ Plain Text Version of the guidance is also available.
We encourage candidates to discuss their adjustment needs
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