The intelligence community’s lead IT shop has launched a shared classified jobs portal, as the IC looks to boost its artificial intelligence talent and other expertise.
Doug Cossa, the IC chief information officer, said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence launched “ICJobs” several weeks ago. He said it’s only available to those with high-level security clearance at the top secret/sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI) level.
“ICJobs is a platform like USAJobs, but on the high side, on the TS/SCI network, to where we can have our staff get their resumes out there in a classified manner, and our job posts can go also go out in a classified manner, so we can match the right people to the right job,” Cossa said during a Monday keynote address at the 2026 DoDIIS Worldwide Conference in Tampa, Florida.
Cossa added that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office are the first spy agencies to start using ICJobs.
The launch of a classified jobs portal comes as the intelligence community has seen major turnover under the Trump administration. Officials have sought to downsize ODNI and return many officials who were on detail there to their home intelligence agencies.
Meanwhile, new Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton was sworn in on Aug. 3.
Cossa said “workforce experience” is a top priority for the intelligence community. He described it in terms of the technology competition with the Chinese government.
“Finding the right people with the right talent for the right work,” Cossa said. “If you look at the AI race right now, particularly with China, our biggest risk is acquiring the right talent to get us where we need to go.”
“Within the United States, and we can see this within the federal government, our biggest resource that we have in our workforce – if you look at leadership, they’re lawyers, attorneys,” he continued. “Within China, their leadership are engineers, and we have to change that. Workforce is critical.”
More broadly, Cossa said his office has identified human capital management as one area to expand shared services across the intelligence community. He said the IC currently has 16 such “services of common concern.”
“If you look at where we are competing around the world in AI today, it is not on the technology necessarily. Look at it in industry right now,” Cossa said. “It’s in the people. It’s in the skill sets. It’s bringing the right skills in to develop purpose-built models to deploy, and the only way you’re going to do that is by managing your hiring and your allocation of those personnel resources across the community more effectively. And so our team within ICCIO is developing the blueprint for how the human capital architecture needs to be defined and integrate together.”
Identity and zero trust
Cossa said zero trust will be another of the IC’s new services of common concern. He described it against the backdrop of advancements in AI.
“If users and devices are going to request and store and manipulate and process data, so will AI agents,” Cossa said. “The challenge we have is that this new realm of AI has completely spun zero trust on its head, where we went from a model of least privileged access or no access to now give a model and agent everything it needs to be operating effectively. Those are two different things, and the only way that we’re going to be successful in that is if we start with a common identity system.”
Cossa said the IC is investing in a new enterprise service for identity management. Agencies will begin piloting and testing shared identity management tools in operational environments this fall, he added.
“We tend to think of cybersecurity as friction prohibiting a function from occurring, but in reality, if we do zero trust how we’ve defined it – which is getting your identity down, and doing fine-grain entitlements to get data exactly where it needs to go to the individuals and the functions that need it – it becomes a key mission enabler,” Cossa said. “So we have to flip our paradigm in that regard as well.”
In addition to zero trust and human capital management, Cossa said the IC CIO’s office has identified DevSecOps and financial management as areas where the intelligence community needs shared architectures to advance better integration.
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