Strategy & Operations, Office of the CPTO

ai71; Abu Dhabi; On-site; AED 300,000 - 600,000; Full time

Job summary

ai71 in Abu Dhabi is seeking a forward-thinking Strategy & Ops Lead to partner with our CPTO. You will own strategic initiatives, manage the operating rhythm of product and technology, and translate priorities into shipped work across squads and ministries.

The role combines hands-on analysis, modeling, memo writing and action-driven follow-through. You will shape how decisions land, coordinate across teams, and help ai71 scale its enterprise AI deployments across regulated contexts.

Qualifications

• Experience translating strategic priorities into executable plans.
• Ability to prototype ideas, build models and move from concept to action.
• Strong written and verbal communication with executive-facing stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end strategic initiatives sponsored by the CPTO.
• Run the operating cadence: weekly leadership, monthly reviews, quarterly planning.
• Prepare pre-reads, decision records and track actions to closure.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, deployment, and commercial teams.

Skills

PM / Product management

Strategic planning

Operations management

Data analysis (SQL/Python)

English communication

Technical background

Education

CS or engineering degree

Job description

Snapshot

You will work closely with ai71's Chief Product & Technology Officer. You own strategic initiatives, run the operating rhythm of product and technology, and work with its leads to turn decisions into shipped work. It is a new role for someone with a strong technical foundation, an operator's instincts and an analyst's rigour.

About ai71

ai71 builds enterprise-grade AI for the organisations that underpin the real economy: governments, banks, and large enterprises. We're rooted in the Middle East and Africa, where the demands on us are at their highest: sovereignty, on-prem, multi-lingual, and real regulatory weight. Those same demands are arriving everywhere, and what holds up here travels. Our work is grounded in a commitment to deploying AI securely, responsibly, and at scale.

Role Overview

We build Ask in squads: a PM, three or four engineers, a TPgM and a designer, each owning a slice of the product end to end. Alongside them, a forward-deployed team works inside the ministries and enterprises we serve. The Office of the CPTO keeps that whole system pointed at the same outcomes.

You work directly with the CPTO, who leads product, engineering and business operations for Ask and previously led product at DeepMind and Google Brain. Your job is to make the CPTO's priorities land across the organisation.

The remit has three parts:

• initiatives you own end to end
• the cadence the organisation runs on
• and the day-to-day work of the office.

Expect the mix to shift, sometimes week to week. The shape of the org keeps moving as the product does, and part of your job is helping it move well.

The work gets done through preparation, credibility and follow-through, and it is hands-on: you write the memo, build the model and chase the action yourself. This is neither an executive-assistant post nor a strategy-only one.

This is not a role for someone who wants the plan settled first. Ask runs inside air-gapped government networks, for buyers betting real operations on us, in a field that resets every few weeks. Much of the job is working out what is true, then getting the organisation to act on it.

Few seats show you product, engineering, deployments, commercial and the board at once. We see this as a tour that leads into a line role: a squad, a new bet, a forward-deployed team or a market expansion.

What you'll do

Strategic Initiatives

• Own two or three CPTO-sponsored initiatives at a time, from problem definition to a dated outcome.
• Turn early ideas into decision-ready proposals: the question, the evidence, the options, the trade-offs and a recommendation.
• Take approved proposals into execution. Set the plan, owners and milestones, then run it until a permanent owner takes over.
• Do your own technical homework. Prototype it, query it, script it, and bring a working artefact to the argument instead of a deck.
• Keep a structured read on the field: what the frontier labs and open-source projects shipped, and what we should build, wrap or adopt as a result.

Typical initiatives: a new market or vertical, a build, wrap or adopt decision on part of the platform, pricing and packaging, the plan for a new squad.

Operating Cadence

• Run the operating rhythm for product and technology: weekly leadership meeting, monthly business review, quarterly and annual planning.
• Run planning for our cross-squad pushes: what each push delivers for the customer, what each squad contributes, and whether it landed.
• Own agendas, pre-reads and decision records. Every forum ends with decisions, owners and dates, and you track them to closure.
• Keep decisions and their reasoning on shared channels, where the team and the agents we build on top can learn from them.
• Maintain the metrics view the CPTO and leads run the business on: delivery, deployments, usage, agent quality, hiring and spend.
• Coordinate product and technology input to CEO and board reporting.
• Flag slippage, risks and conflicting priorities early, with options attached.
• Keep the system light. Retire meetings and reports that have stopped earning their place, and automate the office's own workflows with AI agents, starting with Ask.

Working with the Leads

• Partner day to day with the Heads of Product and BizOps as well as the leads of Engineering, Design, TPM, Deployments and Commercial.
• Keep priorities, plans and commitments aligned across teams. Make sure the right people are consulted before a decision, not after.
• Join key customer and partner conversations with the CPTO, and own the follow-through with Commercial and Deployments.

Office of the CPTO

• Prepare the CPTO for the meetings that matter: the context, the positions in the room and the decision needed.
• Capture commitments from internal and external meetings and close them.
• Draft and edit leadership updates, all-hands material, board papers and external talks.
• Triage requests for the CPTO's time against priorities, and stand in at working sessions where a position has been delegated to you.
• Support hiring for key roles, from pipeline to placing people where their strengths meet our gaps.
• Handle sensitive people, customer and board matters with discretion.
• Pick up special projects as they arise.

The Team

Around 100 people build Ask. You'll report to the CPTO and work daily with the Heads of Product and BizOps as well as the leads of Engineering, TPM, Deployments, and Commercial. The team comes from tier-1 product companies (DeepMind, Google, Amazon, Apple), startups (Photoroom, Sprinklr, etc.) and strategy firms including McKinsey QuantumBlack and BCG X.

How we work

Low ego, high agency. The best ideas win here, not the loudest voices. We approach problems with humility, ask better questions, and stay genuinely open to being wrong. That's how a small team learns fast enough to stay ahead of a field that resets every few weeks, and it's why you'll change your mind in the open here and be respected for it.

We work in the open. Decisions and discussion happen on shared channels rather than in DMs, so the whole team can learn from them, and so can the AI agents we build on top of them.

Who you are

You bring 2 to 6 years of experience and a technical background: a CS or engineering degree, or real time as a software, data or ML engineer. Since then you have worked in strategy consulting, product or programme management, a forward-deployed role, operations at a scaling technology company, or something you founded.

You can hold your own in an architecture conversation, including on evals, latency and cost. You are comfortable with data: SQL or Python, a financial model, reading a result without waiting for someone to interpret it. You have worked closely with senior executives, and you write clearly and briefly in English. Proficiency in French and Arabic are a plus given the markets we operate in.

Experience with enterprise, regulated or public-sector buyers is prefered. So is time working across the Middle East or Africa, LLM products or agents you have shipped, and a previous chief-of-staff role.

Beyond experience, here's what we look for:

Builder: You have a keen sense of ownership and can point to things that wouldn't exist without you: something you founded, shipped, launched or fixed. Side projects count too.

Technical instinct: Faced with an unfamiliar problem, your first move is to open a terminal and go find out. You use AI coding agents daily, and you know their limits.

Operator: You finish things. Actions get closed, decisions get recorded, and work you were handed does not come back half done.

Judgement: You know what to decide yourself, what to escape and what to drop, and you can tell what is hard from what merely looks hard.

Spine: You can hold a position with an engineer, a customer, and an exec, and change it the moment you're shown you're wrong. That includes facing the CPTO himself.

Clarity: You connect the dots others miss, and you turn an ambiguous problem into something a team can act on.

Discretion: You will see people, customer and board matters before most of the company does. They stay with you.

Many strong candidates won't tick every box above. If your experience looks a little different but you believe you can bring value, we'd love to hear from you.