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The National Cyber Security Centre is offering a potential salary of more than £200,000 in its bid to recruit a chief technology officer to serve as “the ‘team captain’ for the UK’s cybersecurity as a whole”.

The successful candidate will assume the mantle of “the public face of NCSC’s technical advice and guidance”. 

The postholder will also have a remit to “set direction” for the intelligence agency’s research work, while cultivating and developing its technical workforce.

“You will not only be taking a nationally scaled approach to combatting cyberthreats today, but also anticipating and planning to: combat the cyberthreats of tomorrow; understand future technology in depth; and build resilience at scale to ensure the UK can take advantage of the huge opportunities of the digital world,” the job advert said. “You will be an experienced senior leader able to operate comfortably at board level and to advise senior leaders and ministers on issues of national significance.  You need to be able to communicate complex concepts clearly and frankly, bringing expertise to the debate, both to senior policymakers, groups of national and international peer experts on public platforms, and to the public through the media.”

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The role will be based between the NCSC’s London headquarters, and the Cheltenham home of its parent agency GCHQ. The position offers an annual pay packet of between £160,000 and £205,000, and applications are open until midnight on 2 May.

The NCSC’s most recent annual report revealed that there were 63 cyber incidents during the year which required the organisation to coordinate a “national-level response.” The agency also runs “covert and overt” operations to detect and prevent attacks.

The organisation’s other responsibilities include providing public guidance on cyber issues, as well as advising government of the security of national infrastructure.

The recruitment for a CTO comes following the departure of Dr Ian Levy, who spent more than 20 years as one of GCHQ’s leader cyber experts, and served as technical director of the NCSC from its creation in 2016 until February of this year, when he moved to a role at Amazon.