Deputy Director (AI Product) - Ministry of Justice - SCS1

Location

London (region), Wales

About the job

Job summary

This position can be based at any of the following locations: 102 Petty France (MOJ) London, SW1H 9AJ. Cardiff Churchill House, Cardiff, CF10 2HH.

Job description

Reporting into the Director of the Justice AI Unit you will:

Strategic Product Leadership

• Set the product vision and strategy for AI across the Justice AI Unit, ensuring investment is focused on genuine user needs and measurable justice outcomes.
• Lead the Justice AI Unit’s portfolio of AI products, making clear choices about priorities, investment and where teams should focus.
• Define and embed high standards for AI product development, ensuring products are outcome-driven, user-obsessed, evidence-led and developed responsibly.
• Shape how AI products are built and adopted across the justice system, moving from ideas and pilots to products that can deliver impact at scale.

Product Development and Delivery

• Lead the development of AI-native products, working across product, engineering, design, research and operational teams to turn emerging AI capabilities into valuable products.
• Ensure teams deeply understand the problems they are solving, test assumptions early and use evidence and user insight to guide product decisions.
• Create empowered multidisciplinary teams that can move quickly, make good decisions and take responsibility for outcomes.
• Challenge established ways of working where they constrain effective product development, and establish better ways to build, test, learn and scale AI products.

Team Leadership and Capability

• Build and lead a high-performing product management function, providing clear direction, coaching and development to product leaders and teams.
• Create a strong product culture focused on curiosity, collaboration, experimentation, evidence and measurable outcomes.
• Build product capability across the Justice AI Unit, helping teams and senior stakeholders develop a shared understanding of what good AI product development looks like.

Responsible AI and Adoption

• Embed responsible AI throughout the product lifecycle, ensuring products are developed and adopted safely, ethically and with appropriate consideration of fairness and public trust.
• Ensure AI products have clear measures of success and plans for adoption, evaluation and continuous improvement.
• Work across organisational boundaries to ensure AI products can be adopted effectively across MoJ services and deliver sustainable value at scale.

Senior Leadership and Influence

• Act as a trusted product adviser to senior leaders across the Ministry of Justice and wider government, communicating complex product choices and trade-offs clearly.
• Work as part of the Justice AI Unit senior leadership team, ensuring product strategy and delivery are aligned with the Unit’s wider priorities.
• Represent the Justice AI Unit in senior forums and, where required, deputise for the Director.

Deputising for the Director of AI

• Represent the Director in strategic forums, including cross-government AI working groups, high-level stakeholder engagements, and external conferences.

Essential Experience:

• Lead Criteria - Significant experience leading product strategy and a portfolio of products, making clear prioritisation and investment decisions based on user needs, evidence and measurable outcomes.
• Excellent leadership skills, with a proven ability to provide clear direction and coaching to high-performing product teams.
• Proven experience building new products people want from 0 to 1, and taking successful products through adoption and scale.
• Exceptional stakeholder skills, with an ability to act as a trusted adviser to senior stakeholders, influence strategic decisions and build strong relationships across organisational boundaries.
• Experience building and delivering AI-native products, with strong product judgement and an understanding of the opportunities, limitations and responsible use of AI.

Desirable experience:

• Entrepreneurial or start-up experience.

Person specification

We encourage applications from people from all backgrounds and aim to have a workforce that represents the wider society that we serve. We pride ourselves on being an employer of choice. We champion diversity, inclusion and wellbeing and aim to create a workplace where everyone feels valued and a sense of belonging. To find out more about how we do this visit: [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ministry-of-justice/about/equality-and-diversity.