Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Oklahoma Human Services•Oklahoma City, OK

13d•$165,000•Onsite

About The Position

This position is located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Annual Salary: $165,000.00 + Full State Employee Benefits Job-Related travel is Occasional - Must possess a valid driver's license and must maintain required car insurance. Education and Experience (Minimum Qualifications) Education and experience requirements consist of a bachelor's degree plus six (6) years of relevant professional experience, including three (3) years in a supervisory or administrative capacity, or an equivalent combination of education and experience, consistent with OKDHS executive classification standards. The strongest candidates will bring 8 or more years leading technical teams in complex government or large-scale service delivery environments, with a proven track record of conducting rapid assessments and delivering concrete improvements within compressed timeframes. Public sector experience, particularly within health and human services, is strongly preferred. Experience with systems serving vulnerable populations such as Medicaid, SNAP, or child welfare is a plus. Basic Purpose The Chief Technology Officer is an senior leadership role responsible for directing, overseeing, and managing Oklahoma Human Services’ (OKDHS) enterprise technology functions to ensure operational continuity, regulatory compliance, and measurable service outcomes. This role has a mandate to assess current systems, deliver specific improvements, and build organizational capacity for sustained digital service delivery. Operating with broad administrative and technical discretion to plan, develop, and organize all phases of OKDHS technology work within established state and federal guidelines, the CTO collaborates with agency and State IT leadership to advance secure, modern, and user-centered digital service delivery. What Success Looks Like in 12 Months Technology teams that are healthy, accountable, and clear on their priorities, with team leaders who understand their roles, opportunities, and gaps, and who can translate technical realities into decisions A technology roadmap that is actively maintained, tied to agency strategy, and used to make prioritization decisions across the current project backlog Measurable progress on agency-identified priority programs, including reduction of the SNAP error rate, as an early proof point of delivery discipline A prioritization framework in place so that leadership can make defensible decisions about which of the competing projects advance and which wait Improve visibility into technology spending, vendor value, and investment tradeoffs so OKDHS leadership can make informed decisions about where to stabilize, defer or accelerate work

Requirements

Education and experience requirements consist of a bachelor's degree plus six (6) years of relevant professional experience, including three (3) years in a supervisory or administrative capacity, or an equivalent combination of education and experience, consistent with OKDHS executive classification standards.
Must possess a valid driver's license and must maintain required car insurance.
Understand how technology decisions across the stack affect frontline workers and the people they serve
Rapid assessment and diagnosis of technical problems without getting lost in tradeoffs
Building trust with both non-technical executives and technical staff simultaneously
Agile and modern digital delivery practices, including low-code and no-code solutions and when to apply them appropriately
Data governance, quality, and transparency in service of operational and policy decision-making
Vendor negotiation, performance management, and procurement strategy
Strategic prioritization across competing initiatives; applying data analysis and performance metrics to organizational problems
Cybersecurity frameworks and secure system design, including cloud and hybrid architectures
Change management, and effective leadership of multi-disciplinary teams
Assessing a major system modernization project and identifying why timelines kept slipping, including experience replacing or stabilizing a legacy system
Shifting a waterfall project to iterative delivery with visible user value at each stage
Conducting user research with caseworkers or frontline staff that directly changed a product roadmap
Renegotiating vendor contracts to deliver relevant functionality rather than status reports
Building data quality visibility that helped leadership make evidence-based policy or operational decisions
Working across departments and with technical leadership to align on user needs
Background check and eligibility for access to sensitive data systems
Compliance with all OKDHS and Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES) information security, data governance, and procurement standards

Nice To Haves

The strongest candidates will bring 8 or more years leading technical teams in complex government or large-scale service delivery environments, with a proven track record of conducting rapid assessments and delivering concrete improvements within compressed timeframes.
Public sector experience, particularly within health and human services, is strongly preferred.
Experience with systems serving vulnerable populations such as Medicaid, SNAP, or child welfare is a plus.

Responsibilities

Deliver Results for Frontline Staff and Agency Programs
Ensure technology initiatives deliver measurable improvements for frontline staff, partners, and clients, reducing administrative burden and improving service access, with particular focus on priority programs including SNAP error rate reduction and child welfare information systems (CWIS) improvement.
Oversee vendor performance with an emphasis on outcomes, usability, and delivery of working solutions; identify procurement or contractual quick wins and negotiate vendor performance improvements where delivery has fallen short.
Embed product- and user-centered thinking into technology planning and delivery across OKDHS programs, setting delivery standards for internal and vendor teams including agile practices, release management, and quality assurance.
Build confidence in data quality and transparency, clearly communicating where data is reliable for operational and policy decisions and where it is not.
Focus implementation efforts on reducing frontline burden, improving service execution, and producing measurable gains in priority program outcomes.
Lead and Develop the Technology Organization
Serve as the senior-most technology leader for OKDHS, providing direction and oversight to technology directors and senior managers; establish clear role boundaries, accountability, and escalation paths across the technology organization
Lead and develop OKDHS technology leadership and teams, fostering accountability, clarity of roles, and continuous improvement.
Focus on building leaders who understand their roles, prioritize effectively, and translate technical realities into decisions
Direct enterprise technology planning and prioritization processes to balance operational demands, risk, compliance obligations, and service outcomes across a large and competing project portfolio
Establish clear technology operating rhythms, decision forums, and escalation paths to improve prioritization, execution discipline and transparency across OKDHS technology portfolio
Work across program, policy, operations, and external partners to align technology execution with mission needs; seek innovative solutions to achieve improvements in programs and services
Manage the Enterprise and Translate for Leadership
Provide oversight of OKDHS's technology landscape, including applications, infrastructure, data platforms, devices, and core IT services, ensuring continuity and resilience of mission-critical systems supporting health and human services programs
Establish and maintain cybersecurity governance aligned with state and federal requirements, including protection of PII, PHI, and other sensitive data
Serve as executive steward of the OKDHS technology roadmap, ensuring it is actively maintained, periodically updated, and executed in alignment with agency strategy and approved funding
Translate complex technical and operational issues into clear, actionable information for executive leadership and non-technical stakeholders; provide leadership with clear options, results, risks, and tradeoffs that distinguish near-term improvements from multi-year transformation efforts
Enterprise technology modernization, including legacy system transformation and technical debt remediation