Finance manager - security

Job Summary

The AI Security Institute is the world's largest and best-funded team dedicated to understanding advanced AI risks and translating that knowledge into action. We’re in the heart of the UK government with direct lines to No. 10, and we work with frontier developers and governments globally.

We’re here because governments are critical for advanced AI going well, and UK AISI is uniquely positioned to mobilise them. With our resources, unique agility and international influence, this is the best place to shape both AI development and government action.

Our Finance team is the operational backbone that enables our researchers and policy experts to keep pace with the speed of AI development.

We are building a high performing finance team that can transform traditional government finance operations into streamlined, efficient processes and support senior leaders with critical business planning and insights to enable us to deliver against our mission.

Job Description

AISI's Finance Manager will lead the organisation's finance function. This role will be critical in delivering outstanding outcomes across all aspects of financial management, matching industry standards. We are seeking an experienced finance professional who can shape the team and define efficient processes, while delivering expert financial advice to AISI's senior leaders and wider DSIT finance professionals.

This role is right for you if you are excited about building a team and reputation for excellence in AISI's unique operating environment. You will have exposure to senior staff in AISI, technical leaders across AISI's research unit and finance professionals in DSIT.

In leading AISI's finance team, we expect you to

• Exert strong organisational grip over AISI's financial position and manage our finance data including expenditure and forecast tracking
• Advise senior leaders on business planning decisions using financial insights
• Own our 'precure to pay' pathway, ensuring great supplier satisfaction through on time payments
• Build out smarter and more efficient systems, working with DSIT and AISI's operations specialists
• Build strong relationships with DSIT's central finance team to make improvements to systems and ways of working, while contributing to department-wide financial information to support AISI's operational and strategic needs

This is a huge opportunity to shape one of AISI's key operational pillars, helping drive up efficiency and service excellence across the organisation in pursuit of our mission.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Build, maintain and improve clear financial data flows between AISI systems, Oracle & forecast modelling tools, shared service providers, and other trackers.
• Manage a small team of finance professionals who are triaging, raising, receipting payments within AISI.
• Ensure purchase to pay processes — including raising, uplifting, and tracking — are efficient, traceable, and correctly integrated in our systems.
• Improve how expenditure is recorded and reconciled, reducing manual intervention and ensuring month-end data is complete and accurate.
• Define and implement consistent data standards (e.g., cost centres, programme codes, contract dates, and identifiers).
• Develop actionable, reliable reporting tools that provide senior leaders with accurate in-year financial information and forward-looking forecasts.
• Lead meetings with senior staff to deliver efficient decisions on business-critical areas, including troubleshooting finance issues, reprioritising spend in-year and allocating future year budgets through business planning.
• Design or support solutions that enable teams to see spend, pipeline and commitments in one place. Work with Finance Business Partners to improve the forecasting process and reduce reliance on manual Excel workarounds.
• Identify automation opportunities to streamline recurring finance processes.
• Document workflows and ensure knowledge transfer so systems are understood beyond individual users.
• Provide training and clear guidance so finance and delivery teams use systems consistently and effectively.
• Collaborate with central DSIT finance and digital teams to ensure alignment on reporting standards and controls.

Person specification

Essential Criteria

• Fully qualified CCAB or CIMA accountancy qualification or equivalent, with professional experience in finance.
• Comfortable working with data and financial modelling tools: from reconciling transactions to shaping dashboards and reports.
• Strong understanding of core finance processes: forecasting, budgeting, accruals, journals, purchase orders, and spend approvals.
• Proven experience improving or managing financial systems and data environments, either within the public sector, a start-up, research organisation or tech company.
• Hands-on experience creating and managing finance requests (Oracle is the system we use).
• Analytical and detail-oriented, with a strong ability to spot and resolve data or process gaps.
• Experience managing at least one person.
• Able to bridge between finance, operational, and technical teams, translating needs into practical solutions.
• Organised, methodical, and able to prioritise competing demands.
• Proactive and curious: identifies problems early and takes ownership of fixing them.
• Clear communicator who can build confidence in finance data and systems across the organisation.

Desirable criteria

• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Power Apps, Power Automate, and other financial or workflow software, or the ability to create and automate your own.
• Skilled at mapping end-to-end processes and simplifying complex systems.
• Experience of government finance frameworks such as Consolidated Budgeting Guidance and Managing Public Money.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Managing a Quality Service
• Changing and Improving
• Delivering at Pace

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £54,415, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £15,764 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology offers a competitive mix of benefits including:

• A culture of flexible working, such as job sharing, homeworking and compressed hours.
• Automatic enrolment into the Civil Service Pension Scheme, with an employer contribution of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by 1 day per year up to a maximum of 30.
• An extensive range of learning & professional development opportunities, which all staff are actively encouraged to pursue.
• Access to a range of retail, travel and lifestyle employee discounts.

Office attendance

The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home-based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.

Things you need to know

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Strengths and Experience.

As part of the application process you will be asked to complete a CV of no more than 2 pages showing your previous work history and personal statement.

Further details around what this will entail are listed on the application form.

Please use your personal statement (in no more than 750 words) to provide evidence of how you meet the skills, experience and person specification outlined above.

Please note - the CV incorporated into the application form is for information purposes only and will not be scored.

In the event of a large number of applicants, applications will be sifted on the CV alone.

Candidates who pass the initial sift may be progressed to a full sift, or progressed straight to assessment/interview.

Interview stages 

This vacancy will follow a three-stage interview process:

Stage 1 – Experience and Motivation Interview

This interview will explore your relevant experience and your motivation for applying for the role.

Stage 2 – Civil Service Behaviours and Strengths Interview with Task

You will be assessed against Civil Service Behaviours.

Stage 3 – SCS Chat

This interview will be with senior leadership within the department.

Sift and interview dates to be confirmed.

Further Information

Reasonable Adjustment

We are proud to be a disability confident leader and we welcome applications from disabled candidates and candidates with long-term conditions.

Information about the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) and some examples of adjustments that we offer to disabled candidates and candidates with long-term health conditions during our recruitment process can be found in our DSIT Candidate Guidance. A DSIT Plain Text Version of the guidance is also available.

We encourage candidates to discuss their adjustment needs by emailing the job contact which can be found under the contact point for applicants' section.

If you are experiencing accessibility problems with any attachments on this advert, please contact the email address in the 'Contact point for applicants' section.

If successful and transferring from another Government Department a criminal record check may be carried out.

New entrants are expected to join on the minimum of the pay band.

A location-based reserve list of successful candidates will be kept for 12 months. Should another role become available within that period you may be offered this position.

Please note terms and conditions are attached. Please take time to read the document to determine how these may affect you.

Any move to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments. You may however be eligible for other government schemes, including Tax Free Childcare; for further information visit the Childcare Choices website.

DSIT does not normally offer full home working (i.e., working at home); but we do offer a variety of flexible working options (including occasionally working from home).

DSIT cannot offer Visa sponsorship to candidates through this campaign.

DSIT holds a Visa sponsorship licence but this can only be used for certain roles and this campaign does not qualify.

In order to process applications without delay, we will be sending a Criminal Record Check to Disclosure and Barring Service on your behalf.

However, we recognise in exceptional circumstances some candidates will want to send their completed forms direct. If you will be doing this, please advise Government Recruitment Service of your intention by emailing [email protected] stating the job reference number in the subject heading.

Please be aware the levels of national security clearance are changing which may impact on the level needed for this role by the time of appointment. All efforts will be made to keep candidates informed of any changes and what that will mean in terms of vetting criteria. For more information please See our vetting charter

For further information on National Security Vetting please visit the Demystifying Vetting website.

Applicants who are successful at interview will be, as part of pre-employment screening, subject to a check on the Internal Fraud Database (IFD). This check will provide information about employees who have been dismissed for fraud or dishonesty offences. This check also applies to employees who resign or otherwise leave before being dismissed for fraud or dishonesty had their employment continued. Any applicant’s details held on the IFD will be refused employment.

A candidate is not eligible to apply for a role within the Civil Service if the application is made within a 5-year period following a dismissal for carrying out internal fraud against government.

Existing Civil Servants and applicants from accredited NDPBs are eligible to apply,and can be considered on loan basis (Civil Servants) or secondment (accredited NDPBs). Prior agreement to be released on a loan basis must be obtained before commencing the application process. In the case of Civil Servants, the terms of the loan will be agreed between the home and host department and the Civil Servant. This includes grade on return.

This role is full time only. Applicants who wish to work an alternative pattern are welcome to apply however your preferred working pattern may not be available and you should discuss this with the vacancy holder before applying.

Feedback

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.

Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is counter-terrorist check (opens in a new window).See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).

People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window).

The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.

The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).

Apply and further information

This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans (opens in a new window) initiative.

Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact :

• Name : Jordan Holland
• Email : [email protected]

Recruitment team

• Email : [email protected]

Further information

Appointment to the Civil Service is governed by the Civil Service Commission’s Recruitment Principles. If you feel that your application has not been treated in accordance with the recruitment principles, and wish to make a complaint, then you should contact in the first instance [email protected] . If you are not satisfied with the response that you receive, then you can contact the Civil Service Commission. For further information on bringing a complaint to the Civil Service Commission please visit their web pages: Click here to visit Civil Service Commission/Complaints.