CTO – Product and Engineering — Social-Infrastructure Portfolio

The mandate

A listed social-infrastructure portfolio develops digital services used in healthcare, education and civic facilities, including access, service requests, asset workflow, occupancy and customer communication. The board needs a CTO who can increase development pace without treating public-service continuity, privacy or physical-system interfaces as secondary concerns.

The operating perimeter spans approximately SAR 30,000 million of projects and operating assets and 675 employees and material partners. Accountability covers product and engineering strategy, architecture, software development, quality, reliability, data engineering interfaces, developer platforms, technical talent and supplier engineering. Business leaders own service propositions and cyber retains independent challenge. The CTO owns technical coherence, release evidence and the health of the engineering system.

These products do not operate in a purely digital environment. A work-order delay can affect a clinical room; failed access integration can interrupt school or facility operations; occupancy data may influence safety response. Engineering decisions must therefore state operational consequence and degraded-mode behaviour. Availability percentages alone cannot describe service fitness.

Recovery requires choices about variation. Some local needs arise from law, language, facility design or service model; others reflect old sales promises or avoidable preference. The CTO will establish a shared product core with governed extension points, then make the cost and support burden of divergence visible.

Why this seat is open

This is a planned replacement over four to six months. The incumbent will continue normal authority and transfer architecture, product and leadership context through a structured handover. The board is not responding to a concealed outage or conduct issue. Confidential sequencing protects project teams and customers until the successor and transition are agreed.

What you will own

• Define product domains, architecture boundaries and extension policy.
• Restore engineering flow from discovery through reliable operation.
• Govern safety, privacy and physical-system consequences in design.
• Establish reliability ownership and evidence-based release gates.
• Simplify suppliers, tools and technical debt by service risk.
• Develop Saudi engineering leaders and successors across disciplines.

Product discovery will involve facility operators, clinicians or educators where relevant, project teams and end users. The team will identify the decision or task improved and the conditions of use. Requests will be tested against underlying needs before entering a roadmap. Product managers will carry adoption and lifecycle consequence, while engineers retain authority over technical feasibility and reliability.

Architecture will separate common identity, workflow, event, integration and observability capabilities from facility-specific configuration. Interfaces to building systems, devices, authority platforms and service partners will have versioning, test environments and accountable owners. Where a bespoke connector is unavoidable, its support model and retirement condition will be approved before delivery.

Engineering flow will be measured from committed problem to verified service outcome. Work-in-progress, review queues, environment availability, automated test coverage and release failure will expose bottlenecks. The CTO will reduce simultaneous initiatives before asking teams to move faster. Technical debt will be ranked by failure consequence, change friction and supplier dependency rather than an undifferentiated backlog.

Reliability engineering will begin with service objectives meaningful to facility operations. Critical workflows need recovery, continuity, data reconciliation and manual fallbacks. Incidents will preserve a blameless learning environment while actions have clear ownership and due dates. Repeated failure in the same component will trigger architecture or product-scope action, not endless operational workaround.

The talent system will build local authority. Principal engineers and product leaders need explicit decision rights, career paths and exposure to live facilities. Supplier teams may provide scale, but design knowledge, service ownership and acceptance cannot disappear outside the organisation. The CTO will require code, documentation, tooling and coached transfer as part of partner delivery.

The first 12 months

Within 90 days, the CTO will baseline the twelve most consequential products or shared services, identify delivery and reliability constraints, and assess leadership. The sponsor will receive roadmap cuts, immediate stability work and an approved product-core boundary.

By month eight, three priority teams should show shorter lead time, two common integration capabilities should replace project-specific builds and the highest-risk service should have tested degraded operation. Supplier agreements will contain measurable knowledge-transfer and exit obligations.

At year-end, median committed-to-production lead time should fall 25%, change failure improve 20% and priority-service availability meet approved objectives. Unsupported product variants should decline 15%, 90% of critical integrations have named lifecycle owners, and ready cover should exist for 70% of pivotal product and engineering roles.

What the board will measure

• Faster engineering flow without weakened service reliability.
• A reusable product core with justified local extensions.
• Operational and privacy consequences visible before release.
• Reduced technical debt and supplier knowledge dependency.
• Strong Saudi product and engineering leadership.

The person

You are a CTO, product-and-engineering executive or digital-platform leader with 18–22 years of experience. You have carried accountable scope above SAR 17,400 million and led at least 500 people. Your record includes products linked to physical operations or high-consequence services, not only consumer software growth.

The board will probe a roadmap you narrowed to restore flow, an architecture exception you approved for a genuine local need and an incident that changed product design. You should be fluent with engineering detail while able to make portfolio and talent choices. References must confirm sustained reliability and team ownership after intervention.

This hybrid Riyadh position requires frequent facility, customer, supplier and engineering presence. Relocation support may be considered, with visible local capability development expected.

Compensation and terms

Fixed compensation is SAR 2.0–2.9 million plus annual incentive and LTI. Measures include flow, reliability, reuse, technical debt, supplier independence and succession. Long-term awards follow standard conditions and the confirmed technology perimeter.

Confidentiality

The organisation, facilities, products, incidents, customers and suppliers remain confidential. More detail follows qualification and mutual confidentiality. The role context blends several operating situations to prevent client identification.