Founding CTO, AI Full Time NEW

Founding CTO, AI (Riyadh)

Overview

Berry is an agentic GTM platform for GCC founders. We turn a prompt into live pipeline. We are pre-seed, Riyadh based, building the Arabic and English stack the region never had. You will not be an engineer who reports to a CTO. You will be the CTO. Day zero, co-architect, equity partner, name on the cap table. You: 6+ years shipping production software, of which at least 2 in ML or applied AI. You have built with LLMs in anger, not in a notebook. Offer: meaningful cash (benchmark to Riyadh senior tech lead) plus founder-level equity.

Who is Berry?

Berry is a team of AI agents that turns a sentence into a working sales motion. “Find me 50 F&B HORECA buyers in Riyadh doing over 10M SAR and get us a first call with any procurement lead this month.” Berry does the rest. Research, enrichment, Arabic and English outreach, multi-channel cadence across email, LinkedIn and WhatsApp, qualification, meeting booked.

The GCC is about to produce 10x more B2B founders by 2030, and selling, not building, will be the constraint. Clay, Apollo, Outreach, Lemlist all assume English-first buyers and US personas. None of that is true in Riyadh, Jeddah, Dubai or Kuwait. Berry is the stack the region deserves, built here, by people who sell here.

If we get this right, Berry becomes the default way companies get built and sold across the GCC. That is the prize.

Who we are looking for

You will own the technical direction of Berry end to end. Agent orchestration, evals, retrieval, data pipelines, CRM integrations, infrastructure, hiring the first three engineers. You will co-design the product with the CEO on design and the COO on GTM, and you will ship.

Concretely we want:

1. 6+ years in production software engineering, at least 2 building with LLMs or applied ML in a real product (not a side project, not a demo).
2. You have shipped agentic systems or complex LLM pipelines. You know why evals matter, why latency kills demos, why a well-placed regex still beats a model sometimes.
3. You have hired, interviewed and retained engineers. You have done it before.
4. Hunter mindset. Pre-seed means the road is not paved. You find a way or you pave it.
5. Arabic is a plus, not a requirement. Comfort with Saudi and GCC context is.
6. You want to be a founder. This is a cap table conversation, not a salary negotiation.

What we offer

1. Founding CTO title and founder-grade equity. This is the one we want to get right.
2. Riyadh HQ, hybrid with office presence expected. Early stage means the whiteboard matters.
3. Full technical ownership. You pick the stack, you set the bar, you hire the team.
4. Speed. Six months at Berry compresses three years of normal career reps. Pre-seed to seed, zero to first paying cohort, your name on all of it.
5. A mission worth the hours. We are building the sales layer for a region that is about to 10x its founder population.

Selection process

1. Send us something. A Loom walking through a past agentic project, a repo, a teardown of Berry’s product, anything that shows you thought about this role before applying. Generic CVs go to the bottom of the pile.
2. Technical conversation with the founders (60 minutes). Architecture discussion on a real Berry problem, not LeetCode.
3. Paid one-week build sprint. You ship something small inside Berry’s stack. We pay for your time, and you see the team before you commit.
4. Founders’ call and offer (30 minutes).