Senior Technology Fellowship

Oklahoma City, OK
Full Time
EXEC-Office of Director
Executive

This position is located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Senior Technology Fellowship

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.

The strongest candidates will bring 8 or more years leading technical teams in complex environments, including private sector, civic tech, or large-scale service delivery, with the capacity to rapidly review, manage and improve quality across technology programs, and deliver concrete improvements within compressed timeframes. Public sector experience is welcome but not required. Experience with systems such as Medicaid, SNAP, or child welfare is a plus.

The Opportunity

Oklahoma Human Services (OKDHS) is offering a 18-month Senior Technology Fellowship for an experienced technologist ready to step into a senior technology leadership role at one of the state's largest and most consequential agencies. This is a defined-term engagement with a clear mandate: deliver real, measurable improvements to the technology systems and teams that support health and human services programs across Oklahoma.
If you have spent your career building and fixing complex technology systems and are ready to apply those skills toward public service, this fellowship offers a meaningful mission, and 18-month opportunity for real impact.

What You'll Be Stepping Into

Oklahoma Human Services operates technology systems that touch nearly every aspect of health and human services delivery in the state, including SNAP and child welfare. These are critical systems serving vulnerable Oklahomans, run by capable and committed teams. What we are seeking is senior technology leadership that can partner with government leaders, assess clearly, prioritize effectively, and deliver visibly.
You will own a real portfolio with real complexity: critical priorities, vendor relationships that need active management, and program-specific challenges including SNAP error rate reduction and child welfare information systems improvement. The technology organization spans applications, infrastructure, data platforms, devices, and core IT services and operates within state and federal compliance frameworks that add both constraint and accountability.

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 

Key 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 wins and negotiate 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 executive for OKDHS, providing direction and oversight to technology directors and senior managers; collaborate with agency Chief Officers and senior executive leadership on short- and long-term goals that drive agency programs and services
  • 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 service
Manage the Enterprise and Translate for Leadership
  • Provide executive 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
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
  • Understand how technology decisions across the stack affect frontline workers and the people they serve
  • Rapidly assess and diagnose technical problems without getting lost in tradeoffs
  • Build trust with both non-technical executives and technical staff simultaneously
  • Use agile and modern digital delivery practices, including low-code and no-code solutions and know when to apply them appropriately
  • Apply data governance, quality, and transparency principles in service of operational and policy decision-making
  • Negotiate with vendors, manage performance, and develop procurement strategy that delivers results
  • Prioritize strategically across competing initiatives, applying data analysis and performance metrics to organizational problems
  • Apply cybersecurity frameworks and secure system design across cloud and hybrid architectures
  • Lead multi-disciplinary teams through advanced planning, change management, and continuous improvement
  • Preferred: Navigate government budget, administrative, and legislative processes as they affect technology investment, program delivery, and compliance obligations

Examples of Past Work
  • 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
  • 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
Compensation and Terms
  • Annual Salary: $165,000
  • Term: Up to 18 months
Special Requirements
  • Background check and eligibility for access to sensitive data systems
  • Periodic in-state travel may be required
  • Compliance with all OKDHS and Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES) information security, data governance, and procurement standards
__________________

If you have questions, please contact [email protected]

OKDHS is a Fair Chance Employer.

This is a position in Executive Management.

Announcement Number: 26-RB002

P107926/JR55482

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