Description

Aspire Public Schools NorCal — Chief Technology Officer

Job Description 

About Aspire NorCal

Founded in 1998, Aspire Public Schools has served scholars and communities across California for nearly three decades. Following Aspire Los Angeles’s transition into an independent organization, Aspire’s Bay Area and Central Valley regions will come together to form Aspire NorCal.

Aspire NorCal will operate 22 schools serving approximately 10,000 scholars across Northern California, with schools located in Oakland, Richmond, East Palo Alto, Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto, and Ceres.

This evolution comes at an important moment for Aspire. Changes in California’s funding, policy, enrollment, and operating environment have created an opportunity to rethink how the organization supports its schools and scholars in its next chapter. The formation of Aspire NorCal creates an opportunity to strengthen support for schools across teams previously organized by geography, improve the consistency and effectiveness of school support, and create clear accountability systems for organizational and scholar outcomes. The new model will require the organization to balance greater coherence across Aspire NorCal with responsiveness to the different communities and contexts of its schools.

Aspire NorCal enters this transition with a long-standing mission focused on post-secondary success and a deep commitment to educational equity, along with decades of institutional knowledge across its schools and teams. Preserving those strengths while building Aspire NorCal as a unified region will be central to the work ahead.

About the role

The Chief Technology Officer leads the technology, data and AI work at the heart of Aspire NorCal's plan to modernize how its support office serves 22 schools and approximately 10,000 scholars across the Bay Area, Sacramento and Central Valley. Reporting to the President, who sets the direction for this work, and serving on the Executive team, this leader owns Aspire NorCal's data, systems, technology vendors, data security, internet connectivity infrastructure, teammate and scholar devices and software, and the policy and training that make AI and our systems useful and appropriately safe.

At its core, this role is about redesigning how Aspire NorCal works, using technology to do it. As Aspire NorCal brings two regions and a support office together as one organization, this leader will make every teammate's work easier and more effective through data and systems that work. That means listening to schools and teammates to understand the current state, fixing the data and architecture, modernizing core systems, and redesigning the work, using AI throughout to speed up the work and help teammates do it better. It also means deciding what belongs with teammates and what belongs with vendors.

The foundation is already in place. Aspire NorCal has rebuilt its data warehouse and reporting layer, bringing together scholar, assessment, staffing and enrollment data, and is piloting self-service dashboards and plain-language AI questions with a small group of teammates. This leader will take that work from pilot to the way Aspire NorCal works every day.

Success is measured by the teammate's experience: a principal gets a trusted answer in minutes, a new hire is entered once, and no one navigates five systems to do one job. As technology continues to evolve, this leader will ensure Aspire NorCal adopts new tools thoughtfully, builds internal capability, and uses technology to create meaningful value for schools and the broader organization.

In the first year, this leader will:

• Draft Aspire NorCal's AI policy for Board adoption and start the security assessment, with the highest-risk gaps prioritized.

• Put self-service data in the hands of every principal, and name and assign the top teammate pain points.

• Agree a separation plan with Aspire Los Angeles by March 31, 2027, covering the data inventory, cutover approach and responsibilities.

• Deliver the data and systems separation from Aspire Los Angeles by July 1, 2027, with no lost history and no gap in service, and complete the security baseline with a remediation plan and an owner for each gap.

• Launch the IT service model and a new HRIS connected to payroll and finance.

• Show measurable reductions in manual work and rising teammate satisfaction with IT, data and systems.

Competencies

Data Strategy and Service Delivery

• Treat schools and teammates as customers: set service standards for the data and technology they rely on, publish them, and report against them.

• Take the data warehouse and self-service dashboards from pilot to daily use, starting with designated data leads, then principals and their managers, then every teammate.

• Find and remove daily pain points such as duplicate entry, manual reconciliation and workarounds.

• Build a feedback loop that continuously improves systems and data for teammates.

Instructional Technology and Academic Partnership

• Make sure the systems, data and tools that schools use every day support strong teaching, learning and scholar outcomes, directly in classrooms and through everyone who supports them.

• Partner with the Chief Schools Officer to give teachers and school leaders timely, actionable data on scholar progress, and to evaluate and scale instructional technology that improves results.

• Partner with academic leaders to help educators decide where and how AI can support scholar learning: vet tools for safety, privacy and accessibility, make approved options available, and build educator feedback into the training.

AI Strategy and Governance

• Write and maintain Aspire NorCal's AI policy for Board adoption, covering approved tools, permitted uses, what data may enter which tools, required human review, and disclosure.

• Extend the AI policy to scholar use, covering approved tools, age-appropriate uses and data protections, developed with academic leaders for Board adoption.

• Set data access rules so that AI answers about Aspire NorCal data come only from governed sources, under the same access rights as the person asking.

• Build a tiered training system: safe use for every teammate, hands-on fluency for power users, and build skills for those designing automations. Track actual use, and retire tools that aren't helping.

• Run a disciplined pipeline of AI use cases, each naming the work it changes, who audits it, the cost of an undetected error, and how success is measured, including the use of AI agents where appropriate.

Cybersecurity, Privacy, and Risk

• Own the security program, including identity and access management, multi-factor authentication, device management, backups, vendor risk review, and a tested incident-response plan.

• Protect scholar and teammate data under FERPA, California student-privacy law and employment-records law, and make sure every vendor handling scholar data has compliant contract terms.

• Protect sensitive data such as HR, finance and teammate surveys, with access reviewed on a fixed schedule and whenever people change roles or leave.

• Run security awareness training alongside AI training, and report security posture, incidents and open risks to the President and the Board.

Enterprise Systems and Transformation

• Own the enterprise systems roadmap so student information, HRIS, payroll, finance and recruiting systems are connected and data is entered once.

• Partner with the CFO and People team on the new HRIS and the payroll and finance modernization, so the solutions are designed together.

• Deliver the data and systems separation from Aspire Los Angeles by July 1, 2027, with a clean cutover, no lost history and no gap in service to either organization.

Vendor Management and Financial Stewardship

• Manage all outside technology vendors and hold them accountable to appropriate service levels. 

• Manage the technology budget against cost per scholar and published benchmarks.

Team Leadership and Executive Partnership

• Build and lead a small, senior, well-managed team, extended by tools and vendors.

• Hold every manager to Aspire's "excellent management" standard: managers set the conditions for success and hold teammates accountable for results. This means documented check-ins at least twice a month (more often for new and junior staff), clear goals, regular feedback, development conversations, prompt course correction, and no surprises if a role changes or terminates.

• Serve as a strategic advisor to the President, the CEO and the Executive team, and lead technology change with clear communication and attention to the experience of schools and teammates.

• Identify and interrupt inequitable practices in the work they lead and influence.

Qualifications

• 10+ years leading data and technology, including at least 5 years as the senior technology leader in a national or multi-site organization.

• Built or rebuilt a modern data platform (warehouse, reporting layer, governed self-service) and drove real adoption by non-technical users.

• Led AI adoption beyond pilots: wrote the policy, trained the people, and put audited automation into daily work.

• Ran a security and privacy program covering sensitive personal data. Experience with K–12 scholar data is strongly preferred.

• Managed outsourced IT and major vendors against service levels, including at least one make-or-buy decision carried through to results.

• Led technology through restructuring, rapid growth or a separation, designing systems while the organization changed around them.

• Sees technology as an enabler, not a gadget, and measures success by whether people's jobs got easier.

• Service-minded, treating principals, teachers and support teammates as customers.

• A teacher and manager at heart: explains clearly, builds others' capability, and makes the team less dependent on any one person.

• Disciplined about economics: knows automation and outsourcing are not automatically savings.

• Attracts strong talent and holds people and vendors to a high standard.

• Bachelor's degree required. An advanced degree in technology, business, education or a related field is preferred.

Compensation and benefits

The salary range for this role is $235,000–$275,000 annually, commensurate with experience. This full-time, exempt position offers a comprehensive benefits package, including:

• Eligible for Aspire health benefits

• Retirement through CalSTRS or CalPERS, depending on the role's credential requirements, with a 403(b) option

• Paid time off and additional teammate benefits to be determined in accordance with updated employee value proposition to be shared prior to offer.  

Location and work arrangement

• Must reside in a county where Aspire NorCal schools are located: San Mateo, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, or Sacramento. 

• Periodic travel required across schools spanning East Palo Alto to the East Bay Area,  and Sacramento to Modesto, including attendance at Board of Directors meetings in Stockton.

• In person with work-from-home flexibility to be determined with the CEO. 

Equal opportunity

Aspire Public Schools is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity), disability, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

Aspire Public Schools provides reasonable accommodations during the application and interview process.