Senior Manager - National Cyber Crime Unit Strategy

Threat Leadership is responsible for the national response to the Serious Organised Crime (SOC) threats. Our role is to work with partners both inside the NCA and externally to set the strategic direction, facilitate effective delivery of the response, and ensure we understand the impact of our activity. Adopting a threat-led and intelligence driven approach, we identify emerging challenges and changes to the threat landscape. A key objective is to tackle SOC threats by maximising the benefit of new capability across the system. This approach means we can achieve more with the resources we have and be more effective developing business cases to enhance our response.

Driving the multi-agency UK 4P (PURSUE, PREVENT, PROTECT, PREPARE) response by agreeing threat priorities, influencing tasking of operational activity across law enforcement, facilitating partner action and informing policy, regulatory and legislative changes to better protect the public. Threat Leadership leads the national response for Organised Immigration Crime (OIC), Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking (MSHT), Drugs, Firearms, Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) and Borders. Threat Leadership is also to the National Cyber Crime Unit, which combines Cyber threat leadership with an operational response.

Information the Business Area

National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) is the UK lead for tackling the threat from cyber crime - a single Unit with the responsibility and capability to deliver operations, lead the overall UK response, coordinate activity across a range of partners, and provide specialist cyber support and expertise across law enforcement.

Drive NCCUs engagement across Government (HMG) to ensure cybercrime policy, legislative frameworks, and strategic responses align with national security, HMG and SOC priorities. - Leading engagement with the Office, NPCC and HMG stakeholders. Advocating for legislative and regulatory reforms to enhance cybercrime enforcement. Representing NCCU at national strategic forums. Monitoring and reporting on cyber threats to inform government decision making. Collaborating with partners and industry stakeholders to ensure alignment on cyber threat responses.

Strategically position the NCCU with global partners to enhance collaboration against serious organised cybercrime (SOC) targets - Developing and maintaining a prioritised list of countries for engagement based on threat impact and feasibility. Creating country-specific plans outlining collaboration objectives, mechanisms, and key stakeholders and monitoring performance against those plans. Coordinating international visits and engagements, ensuring alignment with NCCUs Threat Response. Liaising with CILOs and NCA International teams and HMG to align global efforts. Arranging and conducting international visits in order to progress the Strategic objectives of the NCCU and develop opportunities, relationships and understanding. Developing the NCCU’s contribution to International forums, and supporting DD NCCU to further ambitions for international collaboration. This includes forums such as International Pillar Meeting (IPM), Counter Ransomware Initiative (CRI), Cybercrime9 (C9) and FVEYs Law Enforcement Group (FELEG), Joint Cyber Action Taskforce (J-CAT) and EMPACT.

Inform, influence and advise seniors through delivering high quality, strategic briefings to internal and external stakeholders (including media engagement/coordination) - Preparing and delivering strategic briefings for government officials, senior leadership, industry partners, and law enforcement agencies. Collating intelligence and operational updates to ensure briefings remain current and impactful. Ensuring clear, consistent messaging that informs and influences decision making. Maintaining NCCU core narrative, structured briefing templates and processes for efficiency. Inform, advise and influence the strategic direction by providing high-quality, strategic briefings to internal and external stakeholders (including media engagement/coordination). Ensure NCCU provides consistent and accurate messaging whilst maintaining operational security both internally and externally

Develop, maintain, and govern the cyber contribution to the National Control Strategy (NCS) and ensure delivery against the Cyber Strategic Action Plan (SAP) to drive an effective response to cyber threats - Establishing clear threat response frameworks in collaboration with NCCU and TCUK subject matter experts (SMEs) for inclusion in the NCS. Developing and driving activity against the SAP, ensuring it remains consistent with the NCS and provides clear direction on the required response – holding deliverable owners to account. Coordinating and driving senior governance meetings to oversee SAP and strategic priorities. Guiding the approach to strategic cyber assessments, including National Strategic Assessment (NSA) and National Intelligence Requirements (NIRs). Providing governance oversight and assurance at senior-level forums. Influencing Agency strategy through engagement with NCA Strategy teams. Engaging with Delivery Hub leads, operational teams, and intelligence units to ensure strategic alignment and communicate strategic direction. To ensure strategic resources are allocated effectively, the team will review the SAP in consultation with threat SMEs, regional/network leads and NCCU leadership, ensuring the SAP remains aligned with national priorities.

Leadership - Lead your teams effectively by remaining flexible, agile and open in thought and action. Providing oversight of national strategies and action plans, ensuring that they align with strategic objectives, through established governance structures.

People development - Being passionate diversity and developing people inclusively, strengthening their ability to deliver and enabling them to grow in their roles and careers. You will actively coach and engage people, building their resilience through supporting them in their roles and enabling their wellbeing.

Decision-making - Being threat-led and data-driven in decision making, identifying and utilising data streams to inform on unit posture and to enhance evidence based decision making. Navigating team members through ambiguity by making evidence and/or values-based decisions to prioritise strategically. Being proactive and ambitious on efficiencies, finding opportunities to remove duplication and standardising and simplifying where possible. Doing so, you will balance financial and people resources to deliver against changing priorities.

Skills, Knowledge and Experience

Knowledge of the serious and organised crime (SOC) system - Good knowledge of the serious and organised crime (SOC) system – in particular cybercrime and/or online crime – including partnership working, law enforcement processes and disruption opportunities.

Negotiating and Influencing - Ability to influence tasking decisions and to broker resource internally and externally.

Communication skills - Strong report writing and presentation skills.

Interpersonal skills - Excellent interpersonal skills with experience of working in partnership with internal and external stakeholders to progress complex work.

Effective decision making - Experience in effective decision-making, demonstrating accountability and good judgement.

Seeing the bigger picture - Understanding the strategic drivers for tackling the cyber threat and remaining cognisant of, and aligned with, wider NCCU and Agency priorities.

Leadership - Ability to lead a team or group of colleagues/stakeholders to deliver an objective.

Delivering at pace - Experience of working to tight deadlines and managing competing demands.

Entry requirements: Skills, Knowledge or Experience

Good knowledge of the serious and organised crime (SOC) system – in particular cybercrime and/or online crime – including partnership working, law enforcement processes and disruption opportunities - Knowledge of Serious Organised Crime (SOC) particularly cyber or online crime is essential before undertaking a senior cyber strategy management role due to the increasingly interconnected nature of modern criminality and national security threats. Cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent crime underpin a wide range of organised criminal activity, including fraud, ransomware, money laundering, child exploitation, and hostile state activity. A senior manager must understand how organised crime groups exploit technology, digital infrastructure, and online platforms to conduct and conceal criminal operations. This knowledge enables informed strategic decision-making, credible engagement with operational and intelligence partners, and alignment with national threat priorities. Prior understanding of SOC and cyber also ensures strategies are grounded in operational realities, legislative considerations, and evolving threat methodologies. Without this foundation, there is a risk that strategic direction may lack relevance, fail to address key threats, or overlook opportunities for disruption and prevention. Demonstrable knowledge of SOC particularly cyber and/or online crime should therefore be considered a prerequisite for the role.

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

All NCA employees are members of the UK Civil Service and eligible for the Civil Service pension scheme, alongside your salary the NCA contributes £19,586. Further information on the benefits of the scheme is available on the Civil Service Pension Website.

New entrants to the NCA receive 26 days annual leave, rising to 31 on completion of 5 years continuous service, plus 8 bank holidays.

If qualifying criteria is met new joiners from UK Police Forces or the UK Intelligence Community (UKIC) will have service with those employers taken into account for continuous service purposes for annual leave entitlement only, this will be up to a maximum of 31 days leave (including 1 privilege day).

Other benefits include:

Further information is available on the NCA Website.

In the event of a high number of applications, we may operate a longlist. Applicants will need to meet the minimum pass mark for the lead criteria.

- .Experience of leading and managing a multi-disciplinary team.

Candidates who do not meet the minimum pass mark for the lead criteria will not progress to having their other criteria assessed. Applications must meet the minimum criteria to be progressed to the assessment stage.

You will receive an acknowledgement once your application is submitted.

We aim to have sift completed and scores released within 10 working days of the closing date of the advert. For high volume campaigns this timeframe may be extended.

Scores will be provided but further feedback will not be available at this stage.

The format of this assessment will be Interview which will be tested on the criteria listed in the Success Profiles at Assessment section.

Additional assessment methods used alongside Interview

In the event of a tie at the assessment stage, available roles will be offered in merit order using the following order:

Where multiple locations are advertised, appointments will be made in merit order for each location.

Please indicate up to three location preferences clearly. Only your first three preferences will be considered. You may be allocated to any of the locations you select. If you decline an offer for a location you have selected as a preference, a further offer may not be made.

If you choose to reject an offer and no alternative preferred location can be offered, you will not be able to return to the process or be placed on a reserve list .

Only the advertised locations are available; any additional notes added to the application will not be taken into account.

If you meet the criteria for a lower grade, you may be offered that role if not appointable at the advertised grade.

Conversely, if found appointable at a higher grade but no posts are available, you may be offered a lower-grade role.

All offers are made based on merit.

We’re proud to be a Disability Confident Leader and an inclusive, equal opportunities employer.

We’re committed to creating a workplace where everyone can be their authentic self. If you’re neurodiverse, have a disability, or live with a long-term health condition, we encourage you to let us know any reasonable adjustments you may need during the recruitment process.

If you experience accessibility issues with the advert or require reasonable adjustments, please our Recruitment Team at Central.Recruitment@nca.gov.uk before the advert closing date.

Please ensure you complete the ‘Equal opportunities’ and 'Reasonable Adjustments' sections in the application form to inform us on what support you may need in the recruitment process.

For more on our Disability Confident commitment, visit Disability Confident Scheme , Civil Service Careers .

Visit NCA Benefits and Undefined for more details.

In order to monitor the effectiveness of the National Crime Agency's Diversity & Inclusion strategy, we require certain personal details you on submission of your application for statistical and monitoring purposes only. Please note that this will be treated in confidence and will not impact your application.

Name : Central Recruitment Team Email : Central.Recruitment@nca.gov.uk

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

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See our vetting charter (opens in a new window) .

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) .

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