Chief Technology Officer

Overview A community health provider in the NHS is hiring a Chief Technology Officer to join their executive team. The role is based in South London, full-time, five days a week on site. Salary is not advertised for this position. This is a genuine transformation brief. The business delivers good clinical care, but much of the administration behind it is still done by hand, and the patient system it runs on was built for GP surgeries, not community services. The new CTO will own everything technology - support, engineering, data, and a team of around ten - and will be expected to do three things at once from day one: run the department steadily, fix the most painful near-term problems, and make the foundational decisions about whether to build, buy, or partner on a new patient administration system. The CEO needs someone they can hand a messy problem to and trust it will come back as a plan, delivered. If you thrive at the intersection of NHS governance rigour and AI-first engineering ambition, this is a rare opportunity to shape how a health organisation runs itself for the next decade. Key Responsibilities - Own all of technology: support, engineering, data, suppliers, budgets, and the day-to-day running of a team of around ten - Set clear delivery standards and hold the team to them from day one - Identify and ship the quick wins that save the most time - starting with discharge letters, which are currently produced almost entirely by hand - Review the current patient system, data infrastructure, security posture, and team capability - Make and own the build-versus-buy-versus-partner call on the patient administration system - Assess and decide on NHS Spine accreditation: direct application or working through an accredited partner - Lead the decision on ISO 27001, building on existing security accreditation - Plan and oversee the safe migration of patient records if a new system is adopted - Define the resourcing model: in-house engineers, external partners, or a combination - Embed AI-first ways of working across the team: prototyping with the business, building with AI coding tools, automated testing, and frequent small releases - Present the full technology roadmap to the exec team, with decisions costed and owned - Coach and upskill the team, bringing people along into new ways of working and making the hard calls where needed - Operate as a fully accountable exec-level leader, freeing the CEO to focus on strategic priorities Requirements Must-haves - Proven record of shipping technology on time and keeping it running - Experience leading a technology team through meaningful change - Hands-on familiarity with AI-first software development: prototyping, AI coding tools, automated testing, frequent releases - Experience working with regulated or sensitive data, including information governance and security - Ability to operate at exec level: turn ambiguity into a plan and own the outcome - Ability to coach a team and make resourcing or performance calls where necessary Nice-to-haves - NHS Spine accreditation end-to-end, through to a live connection - ISO 27001 implementation, personally owned - Experience working with a clinical safety officer and NHS data security assessments - Patient record migration from one clinical system to another - Background in community health services What Success Looks Like - Within 90 days: the team is stable and delivering, the most valuable quick wins are in progress, and the exec team has a clear review of the current state plus a costed plan covering the build, partner, and accreditation decisions - By month 12: a credible, agreed technology roadmap is in place and being executed - The most painful manual administration has been automated or materially reduced - The team is working in a genuinely AI-first way, with new skills visibly embedded - The CEO is confident enough in technology leadership to focus their attention elsewhere Team and Culture - A team of around ten, spanning support, engineering, and data - The expectation is that some team members will adapt quickly to new ways of working and some will need coaching - both are part of the job - The CTO sits on the executive team and reports directly to the CEO, with real authority and real accountability - The business is at an early stage of its technology journey, which means the new leader will shape the culture rather than inherit a fixed one Challenges - NHS governance demands patience, rigour, and a risk-based approach to change - approval processes are real constraints, not bureaucratic noise, and the right candidate works within them rather than around them - At the same time, the ambition is to build and run genuinely AI-first technology, which requires a bias to ship and a willingness to move fast where the rules allow - holding both orientations at once is the core difficulty of this role - Legacy systems are a live constraint, not a future problem - the new CTO inherits them on day one and has to keep things running while planning what comes next - The team will need upskilling, and the pace of change the business needs means that work starts immediately alongside everything else