Air Force CTO Jay Bonci Departs After Three Years

Jay Bonci stepped down as Air Force CTO Friday, he said on LinkedIn Monday.

Bonci stepped into the role in August 2021. He did not indicate his next career steps, but did say he would pursue a “cool-off” period.

“Thank you to the entire [Office of the Chief Information Officer] team for a career-defining 3 years in public service. I am grateful for your friendship and camaraderie in helping to move the mission forward,” Bonci wrote. “Best of luck to those who are continuing to serve the country.”

As CTO, Bonci led the Air Force’s adoption, resilience and strategic vision of the service’s enterprise IT portfolio. During his tenure, the Department of the Air Force CIO’s office strengthened its zero-trust posture, boosted its Cloud One initiative, furthered the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and built a series of DAF roadmaps, including recent plans covering workforce, future networks and identity, credential, and access management.

“Zero trust, as a goal, really breaks the enterprise’s brain, since it’s not a traditional requirement-acquisition-operations maneuver and forced us to do more homework in policy and timing and sequencing,” he wrote Monday.

Air Force CIO Venice Goodwine noted how Bonci “made a tremendous impact through strategic roadmaps, which brought transparency and long-term vision to the way technology serves our mission,” in a statement Monday. “Your leadership … has strengthened our capabilities, driven innovation and enhanced IT alignment across the enterprise tied to our DAF CIO strategy.”

Prior to joining the Air Force, Bonci served as senior director of public sector engineering at Akamai Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He told GovCIO Media & Research in 2023 that he found the challenge of the Air Force intriguing.

“I was leading what happened to be the public sector business unit and did not at all intend to end up in a government job,” said Bonci. “The opportunity came up to serve and make an impact on the government side. … I thought it looked like an interesting problem set, and I took the job.”