Status: Full-time

Compensation: $230,000-300,000, depending on experience and other factors, plus competitive benefits

About the Recoding America Fund

The Recoding America Fund (RAF) is a new, bipartisan hybrid 501(c)(3)/501(c)(4) initiative to strengthen America by building the federal and state governments we need to compete globally and serve citizens effectively. RAF aims to restore the core capabilities of government and move to a new operating model—the right people, doing the right work, with purpose-fit systems and test-and-learn frameworks—so it can reliably deliver on its goals. The Fund seeks to help accelerate the growth and development of an ideologically diverse field of state capacity organizations, connect them to each other, fill in the gaps, and help them set ambitious common goals to drive transformational change across all levels of government in this time of unprecedented disruption. Change is coming to public institutions, and now is the time to shape that change in the public interest. That ambitious task cannot be the work of just one party or faction.

The Opportunity

Government never finished its first digital transformation. Digital service teams have produced real results, but the ways of working that underpin them have not broken through into the standard operating model. Billions are wasted on failed modernizations. A handful of vendors still control critical public infrastructure. The root causes lie upstream in how government funds, buys, governs, and staffs technology, and those root causes require structural solutions.

Now AI is compounding the urgency. It has the potential to shift government from reactive, compliance-driven operations to proactive, outcome-driven service delivery, but only if government builds the institutional capacity, workforce, and cultural orientation to adopt and govern it well. The upstream reforms needed for effective digital services (modern procurement, sustained product funding, capable in-house teams, outcome-oriented governance) are the same foundations required to adopt AI responsibly and at scale. And responsible AI governance starts with ensuring that the people making the rules have direct experience with what AI can and cannot do.

We are hiring a Chief Digital and AI Officer to lead across this full set of challenges. This is a role for someone who can see the field — what has been tried, what is working, what is missing, and what needs to be built — and who can translate that diagnosis into concrete strategies, partnerships, and catalytic investments that mobilize RAF and the broader ecosystem to act. A bipartisan coalition will be required; progress depends on embracing the best ideas regardless of their source and building coalitions broad enough to act on them. An important measure of success for this role will be the ability to navigate the emerging landscape of large-scale AI and resilience grants, supporting and positioning our ecosystem partner organizations to capture and deploy these resources effectively to catalyze step-change improvements in state capacity in the years ahead. 

This is a senior leadership role that owns the strategic vision and technical leadership for how RAF approaches digital transformation and AI, working in close partnership with RAF's programmatic leaders, who own execution in their respective domains. This role reports to the CEO and serves as a peer thought partner and collaborator with the EVP for State Initiatives, the Federal Policy Director, and the COO, as well as ecosystem partner organizations.

Key Responsibilities

1. Digital and AI Strategy

Scanning the field, identifying capability gaps, and designing interventions that mobilize others toward ecosystem-level change—developing RAF's point of view on how digital transformation and AI intersect with the government operating model and working with RAF's federal and state teams and ecosystem partners to embed it in the work.

• Develop and drive RAF’s integrated digital and AI strategy—a coherent, evolving point of view on the full stack of upstream structural reform: how government funds technology, buys technology, governs technology, builds and retains its technical workforce, and how AI changes what is possible and necessary across all of these.
• Scan the field and identify the highest-leverage interventions. Map what exists — drawing on the knowledge and experience of ecosystem partners who have been doing this work as well as your own experience — to understand what has been tried, what is working, what has failed, and what is missing. Design programs, partnerships, and investment strategies grounded in that understanding.
• Identify and unlock capital: Scan the landscape for major grant opportunities related to AI, societal resilience, and government modernization. Support ecosystem organizations to tap that capital, enabling them navigate complex technical requirements to secure the funding necessary to scale their impact.
• Drive strategic grantmaking in digital and AI by assessing where RAF's dollars would most catalyze state capacity — identifying high-potential organizations, steering resources toward the field's most critical capability gaps, and designing grants in close dialogue with ecosystem partners that strengthen the field’s capacity to drive structural reform. Be willing to place bold bets on unproven approaches where the diagnosis warrants it, and equally willing to redirect resources when the evidence shows a different path is needed.
• Partner with RAF’s federal and state teams to identify and advance digital and AI-related opportunities in their work by bringing an exceptional understanding of the technical landscape and the real constraints public institutions face in effective technology use.
• Identify AI-enabled tools and infrastructure the field needs to work more effectively — for example, for synthesizing and sharing practitioner knowledge across the ecosystem, mapping relationships and connections, surfacing patterns across grantee and partner work, or strengthening the connective tissue between organizations working on related problems. Where the right tool doesn't exist, figure out how to get it built for the benefit of the ecosystem, whether by investing in an ecosystem partner, developing an initial prototype in-house, or convening organizations to co-develop the shared infrastructure.

2. Partnerships and Coalition-Building

Building bipartisan coalitions and cross-sector partnerships with ecosystem organizations, governments, technology companies, and others that drive structural reform that enables effective digital and AI adoption.

• Build a broad coalition for structural reform in digital and AI that spans the ideological spectrum. This includes think tanks across the political spectrum, AI companies, large SaaS vendors, innovative small firms not currently working with government, civic tech organizations, and other private-sector allies who share an interest in a government that can deliver.
• Surface and help fill structural gaps in the ecosystem: missing organizations, underdeveloped relationships, and shared resources that don't yet exist. Where the gap is an organization or capacity that no one else will build, help design and incubate it. Where the gap is coordination or shared infrastructure, kickstart the initiative that brings it together. In all cases, build for the field's ownership and fiscal sustainability, not RAF's. The goal is ecosystem infrastructure that outlasts our involvement.
• Build relationships with AI companies and frontier labs (and their philanthropies) whose capabilities and interests intersect with RAF's mission. Help RAF and the broader field develop productive partnerships with these organizations, grounded in a clear-eyed view of what government actually needs.
• Convene and represent. Design and execute convenings (formal and informal) that build trust, foster collaboration, and develop shared frameworks across organizational and ideological lines. Represent RAF in external forums and coalitions, helping shape the field's conversation in ways that speak credibly to audiences across the political spectrum.

3. Knowledge-Building and Field Leadership

Building the knowledge base, shared language, and practitioner community the state capacity field needs to accelerate structural reform and developing RAF's voice as a credible, evidence-driven leader in this space.

• Create and disseminate practitioner knowledge that advances the field through writing, speaking, teaching, and other forms of knowledge-sharing. This means both contributing your own hard-won expertise and, critically, identifying and elevating the reformers, practitioners, and innovators across government and the ecosystem whose work deserves wider visibility and adoption.
• Build the field's own capacity to develop government leaders on digital delivery and AI. Work with ecosystem partners to develop and scale learning experiences (e.g., immersive programs, peer cohorts) for the government executives (agency heads, budget officers, procurement officials, program directors) who make the decisions that determine whether technology projects succeed or fail. These leaders rarely receive high-quality capacity-building in modern technology management, and the ROI of reaching them is enormous.
• Build community among reform-minded practitioners across government, civic tech, and the private sector. Connect people working on hard problems with each other and with the resources they need. Help the field develop the shared language and frameworks it needs to tackle upstream reform and use AI to advance its goals. The goal is a field with sufficient shared identity, connective tissue, and collective purpose to drive change that no single organization could achieve alone.

4. Organizational Development

Helping RAF build as a high-performing, AI-native organization.

• Contribute to building a high-performing organization as part of RAF’s senior leadership team. Bring experience from building organizations from the ground up — including culture, operating cadences, goal-setting, and performance management — to help RAF collectively develop the structures and disciplines it needs as it scales.
• Help connect top civic technology talent to hard problems. Leverage a deep practitioner network to help the field place the right people on the right challenges.
• Partner with the COO to make RAF an AI-native organization from day one, helping the team identify and adopt the best AI tools and practices, strengthening how RAF tracks field developments and surfaces patterns across its work, and fostering a culture of experimentation.

Who You Are and What You Bring

• You have built and shipped technology at scale. You have led engineering, product, or digital service teams — not just advised from the outside — for a substantial portion of a career likely spanning at least 10 years. You know what it takes to stand up a product organization, recruit and retain top technologists in the public sector, and deliver digital services that millions of people actually use. You have personally built or directly led teams that build; you’re not purely a strategist or advisor. You bring enough technical depth to distinguish real engineering progress from theater. We have a strong hypothesis that you need to have spent meaningful time doing this from within government, not just in the private sector, to fully appreciate the nature of the upstream structural conditions that bear on technology in government, but are open to candidates who wish to prove us wrong in that hypothesis. 
• You have led AI adoption in complex, high-stakes settings. You have driven AI deployment at scale — whether from inside an institution navigating real compliance, security, and workforce constraints, or by building the tools and strategies that enable institutions to adopt AI — including hands-on involvement in enterprise AI strategy, responsible deployment, or AI governance. You understand both the transformative potential and the genuine risks, and you know that responsible adoption requires leaders who have direct experience with the technology.
• You understand the upstream structural barriers, not just the downstream symptoms. You can explain how project-based funding starves product teams, how procurement rules prevent iterative development, how governance structures separate the people who understand users from those who build systems, and how well-intentioned mandates compound into a cascade of rigidity. You have deep, experience-based understanding of procurement, funding models, governance, workforce, and vendor dynamics and strong views on what would actually change them. 
• You see technology and state capacity as inextricably linked. You recognize that effective use of technology in government isn’t just a technology problem and therefore can’t be solved just by technology. But you also know that state capacity can and should be improved by radically better use of technology.
• You see things others don't. You can look at the full landscape of government technology (the organizations, the interventions, the funding streams, the talent pipelines, the vendor dynamics, the emerging technologies) and identify what is missing, what is stuck, and what would unlock progress. You don't just diagnose; you envision the programs, partnerships, and institutions that need to exist and can marshall the resources and collaborations needed to build them. 
• You work through others. You understand that no single organization can solve the structural challenges in government technology. Your instinct is to build the field's capacity to act — securing resources for other organizations, steering capital to the right places, building shared infrastructure — rather than to centralize work inside RAF. You are comfortable wielding influence without seeking credit, and you measure success by the field's progress, not RAF's visibility.
• You’re a resource catalyst. You have the technical credibility to influence how major AI and resilience funds are allocated and the strategic mindset to ensure those funds reach the practitioners on the front lines of state capacity reform.
• You are credible and effective across the political spectrum. The structural reforms we pursue are about structural government reform, not ideology. You build genuine relationships across the spectrum because you are focused on making government work and that comes through in how you talk, who you engage, and what you prioritize. You judge ideas on their merits, not their provenance, and you understand that the field's reach and impact depend on building coalitions broader than those who already agree.
• You contribute to the field's knowledge. You have a track record of contributing to public discourse on government technology and reform — through writing, teaching, policy work, or applied research — that demonstrates analytical depth, the ability to communicate across audiences, and a commitment to the idea that the path to change at scale is through enabling others. 
• You thrive as a collaborative leader on a senior team in a start-up. You are a low-ego builder who rolls up your sleeves as part of a team to build organizations from the ground up. You invest in building organizations as a whole, not just the teams or functions you oversee. You are energized by making the people around you more effective, and value the ways in which their different experiences and areas of expertise complement yours and make you more effective.

We encourage anyone interested in this role to apply, regardless of whether you meet 100% of the qualifications listed. The strongest candidates will bring their own unique perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds from a variety of sectors and vantage points. We especially encourage candidates who would bring ideological diversity to the team and ecosystem to apply.

What RAF Offers

• Automatic 3% employer contribution to a 401k, fully vested immediately
• Flexible Time Off
• Time off for federal holidays plus an end-of-year office closure from Dec 24 through Jan 1st
• 100% contribution to employee premiums for medical, dental, and vision. 50% contribution to premiums for dependents
• Access to pre-tax accounts if you choose, including Healthcare FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and Commuter Benefits

Next Steps and Start Date
We’ll start reviewing applications on May 8, so we encourage submissions by then, though will leave the position open for as long as we need to to find the right person. We are targeting a start date in the latter half of June or July. 

Reasonable Accommodations
We are committed to fostering an inclusive and accessible work environment. If you require accommodations during the application or interview process, or to perform the essential functions of this role, please email us at [email protected] with the subject line “Accommodation Needed.” We will work with you to ensure your needs are met.

Equal Opportunity
Recoding America Fund is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants are considered for employment without regard to the person's race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.