Chief Technology Officer

The Alan Turing Institute is seeking an outstanding technology leader to become its Chief Technology Officer.

This is a rare opportunity to shape the strategic and technical direction of a nationally significant organisation, and to build the engineering capability that turns world-class research into practical impact. The CTO will lead a first-class engineering organisation, bringing together research insight and engineering excellence to advance the state of the art, develop new capabilities and deploy them against important real-world challenges.

It is a build-and-lead role, not a caretaking role: the successful candidate will have ambition, talent and embrace complexity, and will have the authority to shape what comes next.

It offers the chance to move from contributing to a large machine to helping shape the direction of an entire institution: setting its technology strategy and engineering culture, making critical architecture choices, building exceptional teams and platforms, working with researchers to push the boundaries of what is technically possible and applying frontier-level capability to problems of national importance.

ROLE PURPOSE

The Chief Technology Officer will be one of the Institute's senior strategic leaders, helping to shape its overall direction as well as defining and delivering its technology and engineering strategy. They will ensure that the Institute combines outstanding research with outstanding engineering, strengthening the route from research questions and experimental systems through to robust, deployable capabilities and measurable impact. They will have direct influence over institutional strategy, research and technology priorities, technical investment, senior partnerships and routes to national impact.

Reporting to the Chief Executive Officer and working as a member of the Executive Leadership Team, the CTO will provide strategic leadership across the Institute, working closely with scientific, engineering and delivery leaders. They will create an environment in which researchers and engineers work as genuine partners, combining scientific ambition with engineering excellence to advance research and translate it into practical capability. They will establish strong technical standards, guide investment decisions and develop strategic partnerships across government, academia, industry and the wider AI ecosystem.

HOW YOU WILL MAKE AN IMPACT

• Help shape and drive the Institute's overall strategy as a member of the Executive Leadership Team, bringing deep technological insight to decisions about its priorities, investments and future direction.
• Define and deliver an ambitious technology and engineering strategy aligned with the Institute's mission and research ambitions.
• Build, lead and develop a world-class engineering organisation, creating a culture that attracts exceptional technical talent and enables people to do their best work.
• Forge a genuinely integrated partnership between research and engineering, enabling multidisciplinary teams to advance research, develop ambitious new technical capabilities and translate them into practical impact.
• Develop the engineering capability required to take promising research from prototype to secure, scalable and sustainable deployment.
• Lead the development of environments for AI model training, evaluation and deployment, including compute, data pipelines, distributed systems and MLOps.
• Set clear engineering, architecture and technical assurance standards.
• Guide investment and build, buy or partner decisions across compute, data, platforms and tooling.
• Strengthen delivery disciplines while addressing technical debt and unnecessary complexity.
• Build, lead and develop high-performing engineering and research engineering teams, and create the organisational conditions for them to work effectively alongside world-leading researchers.
• Embed security, privacy, responsible technology and resilience into technology design and delivery.
• Develop influential partnerships that expand access to infrastructure, expertise and routes to impact.
• Advise the Board and Executive Leadership Team on technology opportunities, investment choices, dependencies and risks.

ABOUT YOU
We are seeking a technology leader who combines technical credibility with the ability to shape institutions, lead people and deliver results through others. The successful candidate will be equally comfortable setting long-term direction, making difficult prioritisation decisions and creating the practical conditions for multidisciplinary teams to deliver. They will value scientific excellence while bringing the engineering discipline needed to turn promising work into secure, scalable and sustainable capability. They will understand that training advanced AI models is not only a research challenge, but an engineering challenge involving data, compute, software, reliability, security, evaluation, cost and energy. Most importantly, they will be ambitious and motivated by public purpose and by the opportunity to ensure that advances in AI and data science deliver meaningful benefit for the UK.

Reward and benefits

• Salary: Competitive, with details available on application
• Location: King's Cross, London
• Contract: Permanent
• Benefits: 30 days' holiday, private medical insurance and a 10% contributory pension

Application process To apply, candidates should submit:

• A full and current Curriculum Vitae.
• A cover letter of no more than one page outlining their interest in the opportunity, how their experience aligns with the role, and the contribution they believe they could make as Chief Technology Officer.