Head of AI Transformation

The Role: Leading AI Transformation

Reporting to the Managing Director, you own Echelon’s AI transformation business: its pipeline, its outcomes and the organisation that delivers them. With the Head of Applied AI, you run every engagement as one team; with the CRO, you shape how Echelon wins and grows its accounts.

• Set the direction: Define how Echelon transforms its customers: the offer, the engagement model, the sectors where we lead, and the transformation agenda you take to customers.
• Own the pipeline: Build the pipeline of AI transformation programmes with chief executives, government leaders and the CRO’s account teams, and lead the largest pursuits.
• Advise at the top: Act as trusted adviser to customer chief executives and their boards: run the executive sessions, frame the business case and hold the multi-year roadmap they own.
• Answer for outcomes: Own the scope and outcomes of every programme in the portfolio.
• Drive adoption: Own adoption, change management and measured value after go-live, as the customer’s long-term partner in making the change hold and grow.
• Grow the business: Turn first use cases into multi-year programmes. The CRO owns new customers and contracts; you own programme expansion, and you set the expansion strategy together.
• Build the organisation: Hire and lead the deployment strategists and their Engagement Managers; design the operating model, the playbook, the career paths and the partners that add capacity.
• Shape Echelon: Bring the field into company strategy: what to build with the Head of Applied AI, where to invest and which delivery partners to bring in.

Where We Align AI and Technology First

• Leadership record: You have 6+ years in transformation or deployment leadership, and have built and led a deployment, transformation or customer‑facing technical organisation, as an executive in an AI company, a forward deployed business, or as a founder.
• Trusted at the top: Chief executives, boards and government leaders seek your counsel on AI, and trust you to say what it will and will not do.
• Technical command: Deep enough in LLM systems, agents, data and evaluation to challenge an architecture, judge what is ready for production and lead technical teams with credibility.
• Commercial acumen: You have owned large programmes and their economics: business cases, deal structure, Scopes of Work, and the discipline to decline work that will not create value.
• Adoption record: You have taken programmes past go-live to measured adoption, and can show the value they delivered.
• Builder of teams: You attract senior talent, develop leaders, and build an organisation that keeps its standard as it scales from a founding team.

Strong Advantage

• Sector depth: Deep experience in at least one sector where Echelon leads, such as government, energy, financial services or healthcare.
• Regional experience: Programmes delivered in Saudi Arabia or the GCC, ideally with government entities or regulated industries.
• Deployment background: Time as a deployment strategist or engagement lead at a forward deployed AI company.
• Arabic: Professional fluency in Arabic.

Our Values

• Customer first: You measure your work by customer outcomes, and prioritise accordingly.
• Ownership mentality: You own outcomes end to end. When something breaks or stalls, you treat it as yours to fix.
• Clear communicator: You explain complex systems simply, to operators and executives alike, and make the value of your work visible.
• Comfortable with ambiguity: You make progress with incomplete information, partial data and unfamiliar environments, and you enjoy solving problems where there is no structure yet.
• Long‑term builder: You invest in Echelon’s long‑term success, bringing field insight back into our strategy and operations.
• Builds others: You measure yourself by the people you develop and the capability you build with customers.

The Seat

• Location: Riyadh/London
• Reports to: The Managing Director
• Travel: Regular time on customer sites across the region and with partners abroad.
• Package: A base salary with housing, transport and education allowances, performance bonus, medical cover, and equity through the employee equity programme. Terms are shared at offer stage.

How We Work

• You start from the problem, not the tool. You meet an unclear brief or a broken environment with energy and a plan.
• Curiosity: You learn how the work really happens on site and keep learning as the stack moves.
• Speed: You move from brief to a first working result quickly and do not wait for perfect conditions.
• Rigour: You test claims against the data, check what is delivered and can explain every choice.
• Confidence from an outcome: You organise the work yourself.
• Resourcefulness: Missing access, partial data, an unfamiliar organisation: you find a way with what is available.
• Situational leadership: You lead when the moment calls for it, and follow when someone else has the better call.
• A force multiplier: Your playbooks, reviews and coaching make the whole bench faster.
• AI‑native depth: AI tools are part of how you research, write and decide, and you have led the delivery of something real built on an LLM.
• Where you are: A senior leader who has run transformation programmes and can still read an architecture and challenge an estimate.