Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin has chosen for his new chief financial officer a former mayoral staffer of Pete Buttigeg, who Bronin endorsed and campaigned for in the 2020 presidential election.

Bronin is asking the Hartford City Council to confirm the appointment of Jennifer Hockenhull as CFO and director of the Office of Management, Budget and Grants. Hockenhull, one of two appointments this week to Bronin’s leadership team, started in an interim capacity on Monday.

The mayor has also hired Karen Taylor, a diversity, equity and inclusion learning advisor at Cigna, as the city’s director of equity and opportunity, a new position separate from director of human resources. Taylor, a longtime, active Hartford resident, will report to Chief Operating Officer Thea Montanez and make an annual salary of $125,000, according to the mayor’s office.

Hockenhull’s salary was not available from the city Thursday morning.

“I am excited to bring on people of Karen and Jennifer’s caliber to our team,” Bronin said in email last month to Treasurer Adam Cloud and members of the city council.

Hockenhull would be fifth CFO of the Bronin administration, replacing interim director Michael Lupkas, who took over for interim director Jolita Lazauskas in September. Lazauskas remains deputy director of the department.

Melissa McCaw held the position until Gov. Ned Lamont appointed her secretary of the state Office of Policy and Management in 2019. Bronin’s first CFO, Darrell V. Hill, was hired by former Mayor Pedro Segarra and resigned in 2017.

Hockenhull has more than 15 years of budgeting and finance experience in the public and nonprofit sector, including four years as deputy city controller and then city controller of South Bend, Indiana, when Buttigieg was mayor.

Bronin hit the campaign trail in New Hampshire in February, going door to door in support of his Buttigieg, who Bronin has known for about 15 years.

Buttigieg, who dropped out of the Democratic presidential primaries in May, is now President-elect Joe Biden’s designee for transportation secretary.

Before Buttigieg, 38, announced his bid for president in April 2019, his career bore striking resemblance to that of Bronin, 41. They both attended the University of Oxford as Rhodes scholars, and were later commissioned as intelligence officers in the Navy Reserve. They both deployed to Afghanistan, Bronin specializing in anti-corruption and Buttigieg in counterterrorism.

Both men also worked on gubernatorial campaigns before becoming mayors of midsize cities, Buttigieg an adviser to Jill Long Thompson’s unsuccessful bid to run Indiana, and Bronin as deputy campaign manager for Dannel P. Malloy in Connecticut.

Now, Buttigieg’s chief financial officer will be joining Bronin’s leadership team.

For the past year, Hockenhull has worked as a director of wealth advisory firm ClinftonLarsonAllen’s office in Bellevue, Washington. Before that, she served a year as controller of Bastyr University in Kenmore, Wash.

Hockenhull has as a bachelor’s of science from Indiana University South Bend and is a certified public accountant licensed in Indiana and Washington.

Bronin has been seeking a new, permanent CFO since before his reelection in 2019. Like a number of other Bronin appointees, Lazauskas spent an extended period of time as a temporary director because she would not take up permanent residence in Hartford, as required by city rules.

Lazauskas lives in Tolland.

Bronin has argued throughout his tenure that the city’s 35-year-old residency requirement is a barrier to recruitment, and often makes it harder to hire someone who lives in the region than it does to hire someone from out of state.

In March, Bronin submitted a proposal to make the residency requirement less onerous by allowing waivers for most council and mayoral appointees and unclassified employees.

The proposal is still under consideration by the city council.

Rebecca Lurye can be reached at rlurye@courant.com.