Head of Technology and Systems - our client, Tusk Holdings

Head of Technology and Systems

Our client, Tusk Holdings

NYC: Hybrid

Our client.

Tusk Holdings sits at the nexus of tech, politics, and government and is Bradley Tusk’s family office that supports his endeavors and companies: Tusk Strategies , a political strategy consultancy; Tusk Ventures , advisory-for-equity for early-stage startups operating in regulated industries; Tusk Philanthropies , working to end childhood hunger; and the Mobile Voting Project , bringing mobile voting to the U.S., and increasing Americans' participation in this most essential right.

About this role.

The Head of Technology and Systems will work across Tusk businesses and ventures to ensure that the company stays at the cutting edge of new technologies and platforms, increasing the businesses' competitiveness in the marketplace, bettering performance, and ensuring that Tusk employees and clients have access to the most current tools, data, and insights. This person will report to the COO, and oversee all tech aspects of the organization including network infrastructure, vendor management, and data security. They will develop and manage the technology budget, ensuring that the infrastructure meets the companies' ever evolving needs.

They will foster a culture of innovation, continuous improvement and digital transformation. They will evaluate emerging technologies and identify opportunities to leverage these advancements to enhance operational efficiency and gain a competitive edge.

Technology Assessment and Governance

• Maintain a clear, current picture of what the firm uses across all entities: what it costs, how systems connect, and whether they are earning their place operationally and financially.
• Work closely with finance leadership to bring discipline and visibility to technology spend, vendor overlap, software utilization, and operational redundancy.
• Establish practical governance frameworks for how technology decisions get made across the firm, partnering with legal to ensure frameworks reflect compliance and risk requirements, with emphasis on maintainability, efficiency, security, and cost discipline.
• Be the person leadership turns to when a technology decision needs a real answer. Keep the firm current on what is genuinely relevant and have a clear point of view on what is noise.

Vendor and Partner Evaluation

• For the Mobile Voting Project, the Societal Change tool, and any future builds, take responsibility for evaluating and selecting technical partners, developers, and vendors. Know what good looks like and protect the firm from wasting time and money on the wrong people.
• Manage the relationship with our managed IT provider, with clear internal direction rather than deference to their defaults.
• Bring discipline to a vendor footprint that has grown across multiple entities. Consolidate where it makes sense, retire what no longer serves us, and ensure systems are maintainable long term.

Internal Tools and Automation

• Work closely with leadership across operations, finance, legal, HR, business ops, etc. to identify where workflows are fragmented, overly manual, duplicative, or dependent on institutional knowledge that does not scale.
• Partner with the COO, CFO, and HR functions to improve operational efficiency, reporting visibility, and system reliability. Identify opportunities to reduce manual work, streamline reporting, improve data integrity, and create more cohesive financial workflows across accounting, budgeting, expense management, approvals, forecasting, and vendor oversight.
• Where relevant, implement lightweight automations, improve integrations, or consolidate platforms. The goal is operational clarity, not technology for its own sake.
• Own our internal data platform, ensuring it stays useful, accurate, and actively used across the organization.
• Lead the firm's adoption of AI tools with the same judgment applied to everything else: is this genuinely useful, does it improve how we work, and is it worth the operational cost? Does an employee actually need more tokens?

Technology Builds: Oversight and Advisory

• Serve as the firm's internal technical authority on the Mobile Voting Project's platform and the Societal Change tool. Understand what is being built, evaluate whether the approach is sound, and flag problems before they become expensive.
• Vet and select external developers and technical vendors for these projects. Know what questions to ask, what answers should concern you, and what a credible technical proposal looks like.
• When senior leaders identify new platforms to build, provide an honest feasibility assessment, help determine the appropriate technical direction, and put the right people in place to execute.

Executive Partnership + Staff Education

• Serve as a trusted technology partner to senior leadership across all entities, including the senior leadership team at Tusk Strategies. Spend significant time understanding how teams function, how decisions get made, where operational bottlenecks exist, and what the business needs from its systems and tools.
• This role will also be supported by an operations associate for administrative/day-to-day tasks supporting the COO, CFO as well, allowing focus to remain on strategic and technical priorities.
• Partner with Tusk Strategies leadership specifically to understand how their teams work and identify where better technology, tooling, or process design can support their operations.
• Translate what is technically true into what is operationally relevant, and translate what leadership needs into clear direction for the people building and maintaining systems.
• Be equally comfortable advising on strategy and getting into the weeds when needed. This role requires someone who thinks at a high level while still being willing to troubleshoot, evaluate workflows, review vendor proposals, and ensure projects are moving in the right direction.
• Own change management when systems or processes shift: communicate clearly, build feedback loops, and make sure changes actually stick.
• Surface technology problems before they surface themselves.
• Provide clarity and education on systems and IT infrastructure to help staff keep up with ever-changing space.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Solid experience in a senior technology, systems, or operational technology role within a small-to-mid size, complex, multi-stakeholder organization. A holding company, family office, professional services firm, or consulting environment is a strong plus.
• Deep enough technical expertise to evaluate vendors, developers, platforms, and proposals without needing others to explain what is credible and what is not.
• Strong operational and financial instincts.
• Experience improving operational efficiency across finance and administrative functions through systems design, automation, integrations, workflow redesign, or vendor consolidation.
• A track record of simplifying systems and decision-making. You know when technology is solving a real problem and when it is creating one.
• Genuine fluency with AI tools and a grounded view of where they help and where they are overhyped.
• Outstanding communication skills. You can walk into a room with executives, operators, engineers, consultants, or vendors and adapt quickly without losing credibility with any of them.
• Comfort owning problems directly. This is not a role where you delegate everything or operate at a distance.

NICE TO HAVES

• Experience in political consulting, lobbying, government affairs, or regulated professional services.
• Experience with civic technology, election technology, or government-facing platforms.
• Prior exposure to legal holds, e-discovery, or data governance in a compliance context.

WHAT A GREAT CANDIDATE LOOKS LIKE

• You are more interested in the right answer than the impressive one. You have pushed back on over-engineering and over-investment and been proven right.
• You understand that the best technology decisions are often the ones that reduce complexity, improve visibility, eliminate redundant work, and make the organization easier to operate over time.
• You notice operational inefficiency quickly, especially in finance and administrative workflows, and instinctively start thinking about how to simplify it.
• You know how to help a CFO get cleaner reporting and stronger operational discipline without turning the company into an enterprise software experiment.
• You have strong opinions about vendors. You know who is good, who oversells, and how to tell the difference before signing contracts.
• Executives trust you because you are direct with them, even when the answer is inconvenient.
• You can walk into a room with engineers one hour and political consultants the next and be credible in both.
• You do not need a large team or a massive mandate to do good work. You just need a real problem to solve.