Strategy & Operations, Office of the CPTO

About the Role

In this new position, you will work closely with the Chief Product & Technology Officer (CPTO) and take ownership of strategic initiatives, maintain the operating rhythm of product and technology, and collaborate with various leads to convert decisions into actionable work. Ideal candidates should have a solid technical foundation, along with strong operational instincts and analytical rigor.

Role Overview

Your responsibilities will revolve around three key aspects:

• Initiatives owned from start to finish.
• The organizational cadence to ensure smooth operations.
• The day-to-day functions of the office.

Your work will involve hands-on tasks such as writing memos, building models, and managing actions, rather than being limited to an executive-assistant or exclusively strategy role. Much of your work will focus on making informed decisions under dynamic conditions, adapting quickly to organizational and product changes as they arise.

You will gain broad exposure across product, engineering, deployments, commercial aspects, and board interactions, ultimately facilitating a career progression into roles with increasing responsibility.

What You'll Do

Strategic Initiatives

• Own two or three CPTO-sponsored initiatives at any one time, from defining problems to achieving a specific outcome.
• Transform initial concepts into decision-ready proposals, detailing questions, evidence, options, trade-offs, and recommendations.
• Implement approved projects, setting plans, assigning owners and milestones, and overseeing execution until a permanent owner steps in.
• Conduct your own technical research and prototyping, bringing tangible artifacts to discussions.
• Maintain an informed perspective on developments in the field, including advancements from labs and open-source projects to determine future action.

Typical initiatives may include launching a new market or vertical, determining decisions related to platform developments, and pricing and packaging strategies.

Operating Cadence

• Oversee the operating rhythm for product and technology, leading weekly leadership meetings, monthly business reviews, and quarterly/annual planning.
• Coordinate planning for cross-squad objectives, detailing customer deliverables, contributions from each squad, and tracking outcomes.
• Maintain agendas, pre-reads, and decision records for all meetings, ensuring every forum concludes with outlined decisions, owners, and timelines.
• Ensure decisions and their rationales are documented on shared platforms for team-wide insight and learning.
• Keep the CPTO and leadership informed by tracking delivery metrics, deployments, usage, agent quality, hiring, and expenditure.
• Proactively identify risks, slippages, and conflicting priorities with possible solutions attached.
• Streamline processes by retiring unnecessary meetings and automating workflows with AI agents.

Working with the Leads

• Collaborate closely with the Heads of Product and BizOps, as well as Engineering, Design, TPM, Deployments, and Commercial leads.
• Align priorities, plans, and commitments across teams, ensuring appropriate consultation occurs before rather than after decisions.
• Participate in key customer and partner discussions alongside the CPTO, handling the follow-up with relevant teams.

Office of the CPTO

• Prepare the CPTO for significant meetings by providing context and necessary information for effective decision-making.
• Document commitments from both internal and external meetings.
• Draft and edit leadership communications, including all-hands updates, board papers, and external speeches.
• Manage requests for the CPTO's time, prioritizing effectively and stepping in for delegated discussions when necessary.
• Assist in recruitment for critical roles, right from pipeline management to placement.
• Address sensitive matters discreetly, including those involving personnel, customers, and board dynamics.
• Take on additional projects as needed.

The Team

You will be part of a team of around 100 individuals dedicated to building the Ask platform. You will report directly to the CPTO and work in close partnership with the Heads of Product and BizOps, alongside the leads from Engineering, TPM, Deployments, and Commercial.

The team comprises talent from leading product companies (like DeepMind, Google, Amazon, and Apple,) startups, as well as strategy consulting firms such as McKinsey QuantumBlack and BCG X.

How We Work

Our work culture is characterized by low ego and high agency, allowing the best ideas to prevail without the influence of dominant voices. We embrace humility, consistently ask better questions, and remain open to new perspectives and corrections. This adaptability is crucial in a field that evolves rapidly.

We prioritize transparency in our decision-making, using shared communication channels to enable collaborative learning across the team and among the AI agents we develop.

Who You Are

You have 2 to 6 years of experience with a technical background, holding a degree in computer science or engineering, or relevant experience in software, data, or ML engineering. Your professional history may include roles in strategy consulting, product or program management, operations at a growing tech firm, or entrepreneurial ventures.

You are capable of engaging in architectural discussions, are comfortable working with data (such as SQL or Python), and can analyze results independently. Experience working closely with senior executives is essential, along with strong written communication skills in English. Proficiency in French and Arabic is advantageous due to our operational regions.

Preferred experience includes working with enterprise, regulated, or public sector clients, engaging in markets across the Middle East or Africa, shipping LLM products, and previous experience in a chief-of-staff capacity.

Beyond formal qualifications, we value certain attributes:

• Builder: You demonstrate ownership and can identify projects you initiated or launched.
• Technical instinct: You approach unfamiliar challenges with confidence in your technical skills, utilizing AI coding agents effectively.
• Operator: You are results-driven, ensuring actions are completed and decisions documented.
• Judgment: You possess the ability to decide effectively on matters, recognizing when to elevate issues appropriately.
• Spine: You can advocate for your position while remaining open to change, even in discussions with the CPTO.
• Clarity: You can simplify complex issues into actionable plans for collaborative teams.
• Discretion: You manage sensitive information with care and confidentiality.

We welcome strong candidates who may not fit every criterion but believe they can add value to our organization.