Recoding America Fund is looking for Chief Digital and AI Officer in Washington, DC. This local job opportunity with ID 3654924787 is live since 2026-04-29 13:55:30.

Chief Digital And Ai Officer

Location: Washington, D.C. or Bay Area, CA candidates strongly preferred; remote outside of these areas considered for exceptional candidates with substantial East Coast hours overlap and periodic D.C. and Bay Area travel Reports to: Chief Executive Officer

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 modelthe right people, doing the right work, with purpose-fit systems and test-and-learn frameworksso 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 fieldwhat has been tried, what is working, what is missing, and what needs to be builtand 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 changedeveloping 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 strategya 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 existsdrawing on the knowledge and experience of ecosystem partners who have been doing this work as well as your own experienceto 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 capacityidentifying 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 effectivelyfor 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