Strategy & Operations, Office of the CPTO

About the Role
As a key player working closely with the Chief Product & Technology Officer (CPTO), you will own strategic initiatives, manage the operating rhythm of product and technology, and collaborate with leads to translate decisions into executed work. This role is ideal for someone with a robust technical background, innate operational instincts, and a strong analytical mindset.

Your work is essential in a dynamic environment where product demands shift rapidly, particularly in serving enterprise-grade AI solutions for critical sectors, including governments, banks, and large organizations.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Initiatives

  • Own two or three CPTO-sponsored initiatives simultaneously, guiding them from problem definition to delivery of outcomes.
  • Develop early ideas into decision-ready proposals, outlining questions, evidence, options, trade-offs, and recommendations.
  • Execute approved proposals by setting plans, assigning owners, and establishing milestones until a permanent owner can take over.
  • Conduct your own technical investigations, including prototyping and scripting, to bring tangible artifacts to discussions rather than just presentations.
  • Maintain an informed outlook on the field by tracking developments from frontier labs and open-source projects, determining what should be built, adapted, or adopted as a consequence.

• Operating Cadence

  • Facilitate the operating rhythm for product and technology, including weekly leadership meetings, monthly business reviews, and quarterly and annual planning cycles.
  • Coordinate planning for cross-squad initiatives, clarifying what each push delivers for customers and tracking outcomes.
  • Own meeting agendas, pre-reads, and decision records, ensuring every forum concludes with actions, owners, and due dates, tracking them through to completion.
  • Maintain transparency by documenting decisions and their rationale on shared channels for team learning.
  • Oversee the performance metrics the CPTO and leads use to manage business operations, including delivery rates, deployments, usage statistics, agent quality, hiring metrics, and spending.
  • Prepare inputs for CEO and board reporting on product and technology developments.
  • Identify and escalate risks, conflicts, and delays proactively, presenting options for resolution.
  • Streamline processes by eliminating redundant meetings and reports, automating workflows where possible using AI agents, like Ask.

• Collaboration with Leads

  • Work closely with the Heads of Product and BizOps, as well as the leads of Engineering, Design, TPM, Deployments, and Commercial teams.
  • Ensure alignment on priorities, plans, and commitments within teams, ensuring that the right stakeholders are consulted during decision-making.
  • Participate in critical customer and partner discussions with the CPTO, following through with the Commercial and Deployments teams.

• Office of the CPTO

  • Prepare the CPTO for high-impact meetings, covering context, different positions at the table, and the needed decisions.
  • Document commitments from meetings and ensure closure.
  • Draft and refine leadership updates, all-hands sessions, board papers, and external presentations.
  • Prioritize requests for the CPTO’s time and take on responsibilities in meetings as delegated.
  • Assist with hiring processes for key roles, from talent pipeline management to placing the right individuals where their strengths align with the organization’s needs.
  • Handle sensitive matters involving personnel, customers, and board aspects with discretion.
  • Engage in special projects as they emerge.

The Team
The team comprises approximately 100 individuals dedicated to building Ask. You will report directly to the CPTO and collaborate daily with the Heads of Product and BizOps, as well as the leads from Engineering, TPM, Deployments, and Commercial. Colleagues in the team hail from top-tier product companies such as DeepMind, Google, Amazon, and Apple, along with startups and consultancy firms like McKinsey QuantumBlack and BCG X.

Cultural Approach
Our culture is characterized by low ego and high agency, where the best ideas triumph regardless of their source. We tackle problems with humility, engage in better questioning, and maintain an openness to correction, allowing our small team to quickly adapt in a constantly evolving field.

Decision-making and discussions occur transparently across shared channels, facilitating team learning and contributing to the AI agents we build.

Who You Are

• You have between 2 to 6 years of experience coupled with a technical background such as a CS or engineering degree, or practical time as a software, data, or machine learning engineer. Following this, you have gained experience in strategy consulting, product or program management, operations within a growing tech company, or entrepreneurial ventures.
• You can engage in architectural discussions, addressing issues like evaluation, latency, and cost.
• Comfort with data manipulation (SQL or Python), financial modeling, and the ability to interpret results independently is essential.
• Experience working closely with senior executives and the ability to communicate clearly in English is necessary; proficiency in French and Arabic is advantageous due to regional operations.
• Preferred experience includes knowledge of enterprise, regulated, or public-sector sales, exposure to markets across the Middle East and Africa, familiarity with LLM products, and experience in a chief-of-staff role.

Key Attributes

• Builder: Possess a strong sense of ownership; highlight contributions to projects that would not exist without your input.
• Technical Instinct: Approach unfamiliar challenges with a hands-on attitude, utilizing AI coding agents effectively.
• Operator: Follow-through on tasks and ensure that responsibilities are completed.
• Judgment: Clearly discern which decisions to make independently, which to escalate, and which to forgo.
• Spine: Confidently articulate positions while remaining open to necessary changes.
• Clarity: Ability to synthesize complex problems into clear, actionable items.
• Discretion: Handle sensitive information with the utmost confidentiality.

Many strong candidates may not check every box above, and if your experience diverges from the typical but you believe you can add value, we invite you to reach out.