Pantheion AI

Chief Technology Officer

Abu Dhabi, UAEFull-TimeOn-sitePosted Apr 6, 2026

AI infrastructureLLMsDistributed computeModel servingEdge deployment

Role overview

Pantheion AI is seeking a world-class Chief Technology Officer to join the founding leadership team. As CTO, you will be the architect of Pantheion-1 — our frontier Arabic/English large language model — and the full-stack sovereign AI platform that sits above it. This is one of the most consequential technology leadership roles in the MENA region: building AI infrastructure that does not exist at frontier scale, on sovereign soil, for government and defense clients across the GCC. You will lead a team of 200–500 engineers across foundation model research, sovereign infrastructure, enterprise products, and the Arabic developer platform.

What you will do

Define and own Pantheion AI's end-to-end technology strategy — from foundation model architecture to sovereign infrastructure to enterprise product engineering
Lead the training, evaluation, and iterative improvement of Pantheion-1: an Arabic/English frontier LLM with dialect awareness, Constitutional AI governance, and sovereign deployment capability
Architect the three-tier sovereign infrastructure stack: Public, Restricted, and Classified (IL5/IL6) compute environments with full data residency on UAE soil
Build and scale the engineering organisation from seed stage to 500+ engineers across Abu Dhabi and key technical hubs
Define the technical roadmap for the Enterprise AI Suite, Arabic Developer Platform, and the Sovereign Security Platform
Establish Pantheion AI's applied research function — interpretability lab, Constitutional AI governance framework, and red-team operations
Represent Pantheion AI's technology capabilities to sovereign investors (PIF, Mubadala, QIA), government clients, and strategic partners
Drive key technology partnerships — GPU compute procurement, open-source foundation model licensing, GCC cloud infrastructure joint ventures
Ensure all technology development meets ITAR-independence requirements and GCC regulatory and certification standards

Skills profile

Required skills

AI infrastructureLLMsDistributed computeModel servingEdge deployment

Required qualifications

Domain knowledge

15+ years of technology leadership experience with at least 5 years at VP or CTO level in AI, ML, or large-scale distributed systems
Demonstrated track record building and scaling large language models or equivalent foundation model systems to production at frontier scale
Deep expertise in AI infrastructure — training pipelines, distributed compute, model serving, and edge deployment
Experience building and leading world-class engineering teams of 100+ in fast-scaling environments
Strong academic or research background in machine learning, AI, or computer science
Exceptional communication skills — able to articulate complex technical concepts to sovereign government clients, investors, and board-level stakeholders

Preferred qualifications

Bonus domain experience

Experience in Arabic NLP, multilingual AI, or low-resource language model development
Prior work in sovereign AI, classified computing environments, or government technology programmes
Published research in machine learning, NLP, AI safety, or related fields
Experience in the GCC or broader MENA technology ecosystem
Familiarity with Constitutional AI, RLHF, or AI alignment methodologies