Head of AI Impact

About the Role

Job Title: Head of AI Impact and Assurance (Band B6)
Salary: £72,771-£80,776
Location: Liverpool / Birmingham / Norwich / Newport
Contract: Permanent / Compressed Hours
Closing Date: 22/06/2026

Job Summary

Lead the enterprise AI governance across the Government Commercial Agency (GCA), advising on safe, ethical, and highly impactful AI adoption, line manage a multi functional team, and bridge innovative AI capabilities with rigorous corporate governance.

Key Accountabilities

• Deliver and operationalise GCA's AI Governance and Risk Management Framework, ensuring alignment with the UK Government AI Playbook and the Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard.
• Oversee the end-to-end lifecycle of AI use cases, from discovery through validation to Go/No-Go gates, ensuring each initiative has a validated value case proving ROI and technical feasibility.
• Identify, audit, and remediate undocumented or decentralised AI (Shadow AI), maintaining a real-time registry of assured AI assets and vetting third party vendors.
• Act as an AI governance advisor to senior leadership, providing counsel on emerging risks, market trends, and regulatory shifts.
• Champion a customer led approach to AI design, using deep user research and feedback loops to improve AI products and enhance decision making insights.
• Build and direct multi functional delivery teams, fostering an inclusive, high trust culture and supporting the GCA Inclusion & Diversity strategy.

Essential Criteria

• Line management experience and capability.
• Proven experience designing, operationalising and enforcing governance, risk management or assurance frameworks for AI, data or emerging technologies in a complex enterprise environment.
• Track record of leading end to end digital or AI use case lifecycles, from discovery to executive approval and scaling.
• Experience conducting comprehensive risk assessments (algorithmic impact, data privacy, security) and mitigating associated risks.
• Measurable experience driving customer centric digital innovation, utilising user research, feedback mechanisms and data analysis to deliver proven ROI and tangible value to end users.

Success Profiles (Interview)

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Changing and Improving
• Making Effective Decisions
• Working Together
• Delivering at Pace
• Technical AI Governance in UK Public Sector (to be assessed via presentation)

Benefits

• Competitive salary in band B6.
• Generous pension scheme.
• Discretionary non-contractual performance-related bonus.
• Flexi-time scheme available for B1-B6.
• Minimum 25 days annual leave, maximum 30 days for service related absence.
• Hybrid working model - about 26 days a quarter in the office and remaining time from home or another suitable location.

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found.