Rocio Bauer’s profile over at WashingtonExec is worth your time if you’re thinking about what leadership looks like when you’re serving the Army through a technology lens. She’s spent her career at the intersection of mission and modernization, and that combination—deep operational context plus the ability to translate it into technical requirements—is exactly what makes someone placeable at the senior level in this market.
When I’m mapping the market for a CIO or CTO role on the federal side, I’m looking for people who’ve done the work in uniform or close to it, then made the move into technology leadership without losing the mission thread. That’s a narrow band. Bauer’s path is a good example of how that track record gets built: you serve, you learn the problem set from the inside, and then you spend years solving it from the other side of the table.
The talent pool for these roles hasn’t gotten deeper, and the cleared requirement makes every search harder. If you’re a senior technology leader with Army or DoD experience and you’re even passively open to a conversation, now’s the time to surface. The demand isn’t going anywhere.