Job summary
Are you ready to lead cloud transformation at scale and shape the future of digital services in the NHS?
Do you want to make a real difference by driving innovation, sustainability, and resilience across a national organisation?
We're looking for a visionary cloud leader to join us as Head of Cloud Services. This is a unique opportunity to define and deliver NHSBSA's cloud strategy, lead a talented team, and embed modern cloud practices that support the NHS and its people.
You'll be at the heart of our digital transformation, helping us move from on-premise systems to scalable, secure cloud environments. If you're passionate about technology, leadership, and making a meaningful impact, we'd love to hear from you.
What do we offer?
- 27 days leave (increasing with length of service) plus 8 bank holidays
- Flexible working (we are happy to discuss options such as compressed hours or reduced hours)
- Hybrid working model
- Career development
- Active wellbeing and inclusion networks
- Excellent pension
- NHS Car lease scheme
- Access to a wide range of benefits and high street discounts!
Main duties of the job
As Head of Cloud Services, you'll:
- Define and deliver NHSBSA's multi-cloud strategy, aligned with our goals and future needs.
- Establish and lead a Cloud Centre of Excellence to drive innovation and consistency.
- Oversee cloud governance, architecture, and security, ensuring compliance with NHS and UK Government standards.
- Lead cloud financial management using FinOps principles to optimise spend and improve transparency.
- Support the migration from on-premise systems to cloud, enabling scalable and secure solutions.
- Collaborate with senior leaders, architects, and delivery teams to embed cloud into transformation programmes.
- Build and develop a high-performing cloud team, fostering continuous improvement and technical excellence.
- Stay ahead of emerging technologies and lead the adoption of modern cloud practices.
For a more detailed breakdown of the role and responsibilities please take a look at the job description attached to the advert. We welcome conversations about this opportunity, so please don't hesitate to reach out if you want to find out more.
About us
Here at the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), what we do matters.
We manage the NHS Pension scheme, process prescription payments and much more. Our services are used by NHS organisations, contractors and the public: we're proud to be part of something meaningful, that touches millions of lives.
We design our services around customer needs and place people at the heart of our organisation. That's why when you join us, you'll be empowered and supported to help your career grow.
As one of the UK's Best Big Companies to work for, we're connected to our values: Collaborative, Adventurous, Reliable and Energetic. We care about our people, our purpose, and your progress.
We strive to offer a fantastic colleague experience, where every colleague is heard, supported and respected. Wellbeing, diversity and inclusion is at the centre of this, and you can join our Lived Experience Networks who help us bring our authentic selves to work.
We're committed to being a flexible employer and we try to offer a working pattern that suits you where possible, through hybrid working, flexible hours and more.
Alongside a competitive salary with pay progression, we offer a people-centric benefits package, connecting you to the rewards and benefits you value most!
Ready to join us in delivering business service excellence to the NHS, helping people live longer, healthier lives? Apply today and see where the NHSBSA can take you.
We are people connected to care
Job description
Job responsibilities
In this role you are accountable for:
Cloud Strategy and Governance
- Develop and execute the organisations rolling 3-year cloud strategy that achieves the organisations business objective, working with stakeholders to identify and implement a long-term vision
- Design, implement, establish and continuously evaluate and improve the Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) structure, you will ensure that the organisation has a robust and capably skilled CCoE which meets the demands of our customers.
- Define governance frameworks for cloud technology adoption, decision-making, and risk management, working across the organisation with Enterprise Architects, Developers and other key stakeholders.
- Establish and run cloud steering and governance committees with key stakeholders that will accelerate delivery and harness agile techniques
- Create and manage a strategic cloud technology roadmap, with a appetite for horizon scanning and identify opportunities to work with partners and suppliers to deliver ongoing efficiencies through the implementation of emerging technologies
- Establish clear guidelines for consolidating common enablement services centrally, to increase consistency and accelerate deliveryTechnical Leadership and Architecture
- Design a robust cloud architecture that supports multi-cloud (hyperscaler) environments
- Build and lead a skilled cloud services team, fostering professional development and innovation
- Define standards for cloud service design, deployment, and management
- Develop comprehensive shared responsibility models across cloud platforms
- Establish technical decision-making processes and evaluation criteria for cloud technologies
Financial and Third-Party Management
- Implement cloud financial management strategies, identifying and working with workload teams to implement financial efficiencies through robust processes and efficiency plans.
- Design cost optimisation frameworks and monitoring mechanisms across all of the organisation cloud platforms.
- Create transparent cloud spend reporting and accountability processes across the organisation workloads working with owners to implement and identifying platform level opportunities.
- Develop mechanisms for tracking and managing cloud expenditure across the organisation
- Manage cloud service provider and key third-party relationshipsRisk Management and Compliance
- Develop comprehensive risk mitigation strategies for public cloud adoption, ensuring that the organisation is compliant with UK Government Standards for cloud and technology with a particular focus upon data and cyber security.
- Ensure cloud platforms meet security, regulatory, and compliance requirements, working with the organisations Cyber Security Team and Information Security team as well as external organisations such as NHSE CSOC.
- Create frameworks for continuous cloud security assessment and improvement, including monitoring at a platform and workload level.
- Design incident response and management protocols for cloud environments, working with the organisations ITSM team and workload owners ensuring that business continuity and incident management plans are robust.
Digital Delivery and Innovation
- Collaborate across departments to identify opportunities for cloud adoption that enhance service delivery and operational efficiency
- Accelerate digital transformation through standardised cloud services and tooling, enabling delivery teams to build in a safe and agile way.
- Foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement in cloud technologies, taking feedback from customers (build teams) and looking for enhancements and improvements which meet the demands of customers.
- Identify and implement emerging cloud technologies and practices, reviewing the industry direction across cloud technologies horizon scanning and building relations with suppliers to identify opportunities.
- Play a key advisory role in transforming applications to run more effectively in cloud and educating cloud tenant teams
Staff Management
- Overall management of appropriate functions and teams within the cloud centre of excellence, including staff development, recruitment, resources, delivery and financial elements applying a matrix management approach with staff having a host manager/team but being embedded within different service delivery teams and communities of practice
- Enabling the performance of others through contributing to GROW conversations within your area, including objective setting fully aligned to directorate and organisational objectives and goals, and the development and motivation of staff to achieve them, including implementing and conducting appraisals and 1-1s to manage performance
- Leading by example. setting the culture of the team to maximise performance and colleague engagement
Knowledge Management
- Leading on the strategic oversight of any new research initiatives, legislation, working practices, policies, procedures, contracts and systems and keeping abreast of technological advances to maintain an excellent understanding of the use of technology in delivering business objectives.
- To continually develop domain knowledge and leadership skills and expertise at the forefront of sector. Investigate research and development to support future business needs and develop an understanding of emerging technologies and business opportunities across a range of topics and engage in the support and development of the organisation, department and team.
- Taking ownership for decision making within the service and shared ownership of wider directorate decisions developing well thought out solutions, processes and work as required, in conjunction with agreed procedures.
Financial Management
- Overall responsibility for financial budgets and to effectively manage this in accordance with NHSBSAs policies, standing orders, financial regulations and legislative requirements.
- Develop proposals for future investment including both run and change project based work; preparing necessary estimates, mandates and business cases within the department and providing estimates for such led by other departments.
Relationship Management
- Identify and develop partnership working opportunities, and relationships both within the organisation, with its stakeholders, and to liaise with other Government, Non-Government organisations, statutory agencies and public and private sector organisations to develop collaborative approaches which can deliver value to the organisation.
- Establish and maintain effective operational relationships with suppliers, ensuring that the service can deliver its functions throughout the supply chain and that collaboration between internal and external suppliers achieves a positive approach to delivering new solutions and to resolving problems in a timely manner.
- Lead with applying effective communications across the directorate, work in a collaborative manner with colleagues across the directorate. Team and all team members, you will demonstrate the CARE values of the organisation and ensure an effective communications between the department and all users.
Information Management
- Implement processes to review, analyse, monitor and report on a number of areas including agreed service levels, KPI's and standards within team. Reviewing the performance of teams and services in delivery against defined service levels, checking for trends that may trigger reduced performance and investigating where performance is below the agreed thresholds. Ensure that in managing performance a holistic approach is taken and that consideration is given to people, process, changes in demand and tools.
- Monitoring, reviewing accuracy and authorising a number of activities including financial claims leave requests and timesheet submissions at both team and individual level to both assure accuracy and to inform forward planning and resource management.
Delivery Management
- Define and lead workforce planning, ensuring operational, commitments are fully met, business change is estimated, prioritised, and delivered, resourcing issues are identified, mitigated and managed, across multiple teams to deliver business value.
- Leading, managing and engaging teams to deliver multiple strands of work such as continuous improvement, project related work, and operational tasks, both within the organisation and across external bodies to meet strategic goals and deliver high quality outputs for the organisation.
- Leading on procurement of relevant goods and services for department, including reviewing and approving specifications or statements of works, selecting suppliers, accountability for delivery of quality outputs, meeting delivery timescales. Giving full consideration to cost, specification, maintenance and support to ensure the overall needs of the business are met from an departmental perspective, and that they are aligned with the business and DDaT strategic directions.
Please refer to the full job description attached for full details
Job description
Job responsibilities
In this role you are accountable for:
Cloud Strategy and Governance
- Develop and execute the organisations rolling 3-year cloud strategy that achieves the organisations business objective, working with stakeholders to identify and implement a long-term vision
- Design, implement, establish and continuously evaluate and improve the Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) structure, you will ensure that the organisation has a robust and capably skilled CCoE which meets the demands of our customers.
- Define governance frameworks for cloud technology adoption, decision-making, and risk management, working across the organisation with Enterprise Architects, Developers and other key stakeholders.
- Establish and run cloud steering and governance committees with key stakeholders that will accelerate delivery and harness agile techniques
- Create and manage a strategic cloud technology roadmap, with a appetite for horizon scanning and identify opportunities to work with partners and suppliers to deliver ongoing efficiencies through the implementation of emerging technologies
- Establish clear guidelines for consolidating common enablement services centrally, to increase consistency and accelerate deliveryTechnical Leadership and Architecture
- Design a robust cloud architecture that supports multi-cloud (hyperscaler) environments
- Build and lead a skilled cloud services team, fostering professional development and innovation
- Define standards for cloud service design, deployment, and management
- Develop comprehensive shared responsibility models across cloud platforms
- Establish technical decision-making processes and evaluation criteria for cloud technologies
Financial and Third-Party Management
- Implement cloud financial management strategies, identifying and working with workload teams to implement financial efficiencies through robust processes and efficiency plans.
- Design cost optimisation frameworks and monitoring mechanisms across all of the organisation cloud platforms.
- Create transparent cloud spend reporting and accountability processes across the organisation workloads working with owners to implement and identifying platform level opportunities.
- Develop mechanisms for tracking and managing cloud expenditure across the organisation
- Manage cloud service provider and key third-party relationshipsRisk Management and Compliance
- Develop comprehensive risk mitigation strategies for public cloud adoption, ensuring that the organisation is compliant with UK Government Standards for cloud and technology with a particular focus upon data and cyber security.
- Ensure cloud platforms meet security, regulatory, and compliance requirements, working with the organisations Cyber Security Team and Information Security team as well as external organisations such as NHSE CSOC.
- Create frameworks for continuous cloud security assessment and improvement, including monitoring at a platform and workload level.
- Design incident response and management protocols for cloud environments, working with the organisations ITSM team and workload owners ensuring that business continuity and incident management plans are robust.
Digital Delivery and Innovation
- Collaborate across departments to identify opportunities for cloud adoption that enhance service delivery and operational efficiency
- Accelerate digital transformation through standardised cloud services and tooling, enabling delivery teams to build in a safe and agile way.
- Foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement in cloud technologies, taking feedback from customers (build teams) and looking for enhancements and improvements which meet the demands of customers.
- Identify and implement emerging cloud technologies and practices, reviewing the industry direction across cloud technologies horizon scanning and building relations with suppliers to identify opportunities.
- Play a key advisory role in transforming applications to run more effectively in cloud and educating cloud tenant teams
Staff Management
- Overall management of appropriate functions and teams within the cloud centre of excellence, including staff development, recruitment, resources, delivery and financial elements applying a matrix management approach with staff having a host manager/team but being embedded within different service delivery teams and communities of practice
- Enabling the performance of others through contributing to GROW conversations within your area, including objective setting fully aligned to directorate and organisational objectives and goals, and the development and motivation of staff to achieve them, including implementing and conducting appraisals and 1-1s to manage performance
- Leading by example. setting the culture of the team to maximise performance and colleague engagement
Knowledge Management
- Leading on the strategic oversight of any new research initiatives, legislation, working practices, policies, procedures, contracts and systems and keeping abreast of technological advances to maintain an excellent understanding of the use of technology in delivering business objectives.
- To continually develop domain knowledge and leadership skills and expertise at the forefront of sector. Investigate research and development to support future business needs and develop an understanding of emerging technologies and business opportunities across a range of topics and engage in the support and development of the organisation, department and team.
- Taking ownership for decision making within the service and shared ownership of wider directorate decisions developing well thought out solutions, processes and work as required, in conjunction with agreed procedures.
Financial Management
- Overall responsibility for financial budgets and to effectively manage this in accordance with NHSBSAs policies, standing orders, financial regulations and legislative requirements.
- Develop proposals for future investment including both run and change project based work; preparing necessary estimates, mandates and business cases within the department and providing estimates for such led by other departments.
Relationship Management
- Identify and develop partnership working opportunities, and relationships both within the organisation, with its stakeholders, and to liaise with other Government, Non-Government organisations, statutory agencies and public and private sector organisations to develop collaborative approaches which can deliver value to the organisation.
- Establish and maintain effective operational relationships with suppliers, ensuring that the service can deliver its functions throughout the supply chain and that collaboration between internal and external suppliers achieves a positive approach to delivering new solutions and to resolving problems in a timely manner.
- Lead with applying effective communications across the directorate, work in a collaborative manner with colleagues across the directorate. Team and all team members, you will demonstrate the CARE values of the organisation and ensure an effective communications between the department and all users.
Information Management
- Implement processes to review, analyse, monitor and report on a number of areas including agreed service levels, KPI's and standards within team. Reviewing the performance of teams and services in delivery against defined service levels, checking for trends that may trigger reduced performance and investigating where performance is below the agreed thresholds. Ensure that in managing performance a holistic approach is taken and that consideration is given to people, process, changes in demand and tools.
- Monitoring, reviewing accuracy and authorising a number of activities including financial claims leave requests and timesheet submissions at both team and individual level to both assure accuracy and to inform forward planning and resource management.
Delivery Management
- Define and lead workforce planning, ensuring operational, commitments are fully met, business change is estimated, prioritised, and delivered, resourcing issues are identified, mitigated and managed, across multiple teams to deliver business value.
- Leading, managing and engaging teams to deliver multiple strands of work such as continuous improvement, project related work, and operational tasks, both within the organisation and across external bodies to meet strategic goals and deliver high quality outputs for the organisation.
- Leading on procurement of relevant goods and services for department, including reviewing and approving specifications or statements of works, selecting suppliers, accountability for delivery of quality outputs, meeting delivery timescales. Giving full consideration to cost, specification, maintenance and support to ensure the overall needs of the business are met from an departmental perspective, and that they are aligned with the business and DDaT strategic directions.
Please refer to the full job description attached for full details
Person Specification
Personal Qualities, Knowledge and Skills
Essential
- Strategic visionary with exceptional leadership capabilities
- Excellent communication skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Ability to drive organisational change and foster innovation
- Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities
- Adaptable and forward-thinking approach to technological challenges
- Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)
- Cloud architecture design and implementation experience
- Modern Cloud deployment and implementation tools and practices
- DevOps and SRE practices
- Financial management
Desirable
- Understanding of public sector digital standards and frameworks, such as the Government Digital Service (GDS) Service Standard and Technology Code of Practice.
- Familiarity with sustainability principles in cloud services, including green cloud strategies and environmental impact reduction.
- Active participation in professional or open-source communities, contributing to the wider tech ecosystem and staying ahead of industry trends.
Experience
Essential
- Extensive experience in cloud strategy, architecture, and multi-cloud environments
- Proven track record of leading cloud transformation initiatives
- Advanced understanding of AWS and Azure platforms
- Strong knowledge of DevOps, cloud-native architectures, and modern application development
- Expertise in cloud governance, security, and compliance frameworks
- Demonstrated experience in FinOps and cloud cost management
- Experience in senior leadership roles, with a track record of effective management of teams.
Desirable
- Experience leading cloud services in regulated industries, such as health or central/local government.
- Familiarity with contract negotiation under government procurement frameworks
- Experience mentoring and developing cross-functional cloud teams, especially in matrixed organisational structures.
Qualifications
Essential
- Post graduate degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field, and/or evidence of undertaking rigorous research in a relevant field and/or in-depth experience.
- Cloud architecture certifications (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud preferred)
Desirable
- Additional professional IT certifications advantageous
- Formal leadership or executive development training, especially related to digital or technology leadership in complex environments.
Person Specification
Personal Qualities, Knowledge and Skills
Essential
- Strategic visionary with exceptional leadership capabilities
- Excellent communication skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Ability to drive organisational change and foster innovation
- Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities
- Adaptable and forward-thinking approach to technological challenges
- Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)
- Cloud architecture design and implementation experience
- Modern Cloud deployment and implementation tools and practices
- DevOps and SRE practices
- Financial management
Desirable
- Understanding of public sector digital standards and frameworks, such as the Government Digital Service (GDS) Service Standard and Technology Code of Practice.
- Familiarity with sustainability principles in cloud services, including green cloud strategies and environmental impact reduction.
- Active participation in professional or open-source communities, contributing to the wider tech ecosystem and staying ahead of industry trends.
Experience
Essential
- Extensive experience in cloud strategy, architecture, and multi-cloud environments
- Proven track record of leading cloud transformation initiatives
- Advanced understanding of AWS and Azure platforms
- Strong knowledge of DevOps, cloud-native architectures, and modern application development
- Expertise in cloud governance, security, and compliance frameworks
- Demonstrated experience in FinOps and cloud cost management
- Experience in senior leadership roles, with a track record of effective management of teams.
Desirable
- Experience leading cloud services in regulated industries, such as health or central/local government.
- Familiarity with contract negotiation under government procurement frameworks
- Experience mentoring and developing cross-functional cloud teams, especially in matrixed organisational structures.
Qualifications
Essential
- Post graduate degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field, and/or evidence of undertaking rigorous research in a relevant field and/or in-depth experience.
- Cloud architecture certifications (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud preferred)
Desirable
- Additional professional IT certifications advantageous
- Formal leadership or executive development training, especially related to digital or technology leadership in complex environments.
