Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan plans to nominate Saad Bashir as the city’s new chief technology officer to oversee a massive department that powers the municipal government.
For the past eight years, Bashir has served as chief information officer for the City of Ottawa, where he oversaw an annual budget of $55 million and 300 full-time employees, according to the Ottawa Citizen.
If confirmed, Bashir will fill the vacancy left by Michael Mattmiller a year ago. Mattmiller was originally appointed by former Mayor Ed Murray, who formed the Seattle Information Technology department in 2015 to centralize IT teams that were dispersed across city government. Mattmiller resigned from the post last January.
Bashir would inherit a department providing IT support for more than 12,000 city employees and running all of the municipal government’s technology services. More than 750 employees work in IT roles for the city on a wide range of initiatives including an open data portal and the Seattle Channel television station.
Durkan will formally announce her nomination of Bashir at Seattle City Hall Tuesday morning.
Update, March 18: The Seattle City Council voted 9-0 to confirm Bashir as the city’s new CTO. “We knew that finding a new CTO for the City of Seattle wouldn’t be easy,” Dukran said in a statement. “We were in search of a visionary leader with experience in technology, technical engineering and operations, and digital equity. I’m confident that Saad is that leader.”
