Programme Officer — Government Liaison

We are building for a sovereign national defence authority in the Gulf — the world's most advanced military human performance and readiness platform, serving military personnel, specialist cohorts, and the families who support them.

The platform is already in production with major U.S. federal agencies.

We are looking for a Programme Officer to be embedded on-site in Abu Dhabi as the operational backbone of our in-country delivery presence.

You sit alongside the VP, Programme Delivery and together you are the two-person team that holds this programme together at the client interface.

This is a programme management role with a credential that matters: you hold the institutional access and trust that no one on our engineering or product team — however capable — can substitute.

That credential gets you in the room.

What you do in the room is what this role is about.

If you are someone who understands that institutional access is only half the credential — that what you do in the room is the other half — this role was built for you.

People who treat government access as a title rather than a responsibility will not thrive here.

CornerstoneX builds Persona AI — the infrastructure for AI that holds genuine relationship-grade continuity with individuals at population scale.

HOPE, our metahuman AI, is in production today with U.S. government agencies across sovereign, regulated, and high-consequence environments: law enforcement, national defence, military families, healthcare, public services.

The technology has been used to protect borders, support families under pressure, and help institutions do things they could not do before, alongside partners including NVIDIA, Oracle, and Google.

We are a focused, senior team.

CornerstoneX does not run a permission-based culture.

We hire people who identify what needs to happen and do it — without being asked.

Who bring proposed solutions, not just flags.

Who close their own loops without being chased.

With delivery teams around the world, people who wait for direction go invisible — and invisible means things break.

If that is how you operate, this role is for you.

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Based in Abu Dhabi — on-site presence is not optional for this role

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Gulf Arabic as a native or primary language; strong professional English for internal documentation

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5–8 years of professional experience post-national service, in technology, government digital programmes, consulting, or programme coordination

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Programme or project management experience — you have managed delivery timelines, coordinated across multiple stakeholders, and know what it means to keep a complex programme on track

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Software delivery fluency — you understand sprint cycles, functional specifications, and what a delivered feature looks like against acceptance criteria.

You do not need to write code.

You need to evaluate whether what was built matches what was asked for.

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Discretion and composure in environments where sensitive government relationships operate within defined information boundaries

Valued but not required

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PMP or equivalent project management credential

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Prior experience working for or alongside a Western technology company in a government or institutional context

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Experience in defence, national security, or government digital transformation environments

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Familiarity with agile delivery methodologies

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Autonomous decision-making

— when direction is unclear, we look for people who move forward and report back, not wait.

In a programme where the VP is not always in the room, someone who defaults to waiting creates gaps in the record that are hard to recover.

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Problem ownership

— a flag without a direction escalates the same problem upward.

The Programme Officer role requires constant judgment calls; ownership means arriving with a view on what should happen, not just documentation of what went wrong.

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Loop closing

— every client interaction produces open items.

Every open item closes.

Not because the VP followed up, but because the Programme Officer tracked it.

This is non-negotiable in a role that is, in practice, the programme's record-keeping function.

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Cultural translation ownership

— in every institutional environment, there is a gap between what was formally scoped and what the organisation will actually accept.

We look for people who see that gap early, name it proactively, and bring it to the VP before it becomes a problem.

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Milestone and deadline disciplin

e — when a deadline is at risk, escalation happens early and comes with options.

Quiet management of a slipping timeline is not acceptable.

Deadline ownership means the problem reaches leadership with time to solve it.

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Own the meeting record

Every interaction with our government client produces a definitive written record — in Arabic and English — of who attended, what was presented, what was agreed, what was not agreed, and what is open.

This document is not a courtesy.

It is our scope protection instrument and your most important recurring deliverable.

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Translate requirements into delivery language

When our client describes what they want — in conversation, in Arabic, through institutional shorthand — you convert that into precise written functional requirements the product and engineering team can act on.

You are the gap-closer between what the client said and what the team heard.

When the gap is ambiguous, you surface it rather than guess.

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Protect scope at the point of contact

Informal requests, verbal additions, and “can you just…” conversations happen at every programme.

Your job is to surface them immediately, document them, and escalate to the VP before any informal commitment takes hold.

You capture and escalate.

You do not commit on behalf of CornerstoneX — ever.

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Support platform acceptance evaluation

When our AI platform is demonstrated to or evaluated by client stakeholders, you are present as a cultural and linguistic observer.

You flag whether interactions are appropriate in register, formality, and cultural context for this institutional environment.

This is an observer function — technical approval authority sits with the engineering team.

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Maintain the internal delivery brief

Between client interactions, you keep the VP, CPO, and CTO current on the full picture of the client environment — what is being asked for informally, what the mood is, what you are hearing that has not made it into a formal meeting.

You are the programme's real-time intelligence layer for the in-country environment.

Base salary:

AED 23,000 – 28,000 per month

Performance bonus:

Milestone-triggered; negotiated individually

Health insurance:

Comprehensive, employer-provided (employee + dependents)

End-of-service gratuity:

5% employee · 12.5% employer pension contributions

Tax environment:

UAE has no personal income tax

The technology works.

It is in production with U.S. federal agencies today and being deployed to a sovereign national defence community at a scale that has not been attempted before.

What determines whether it reaches that community correctly is the quality of the interface between our team and our client.

This role is that interface.

For the people this platform serves — military personnel, specialist cohorts, families — a system that operates well is genuinely life-changing: less friction, more clarity, better support when it matters.

The meeting records you write and the requirements you surface are what make that real.

This is one of two roles that hold this programme together.

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Authority to commit CornerstoneX to scope, timelines, or deliverables — that sits with the VP, Programme Delivery

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Engineering, architectural, or technical design responsibilities

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Contract negotiation or commercial representation of CornerstoneX

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Senior stakeholder relationship ownership — that sits with the VP and CEO

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Translation or administrative support functions unrelated to the programme delivery record

Our hiring process reflects how we work.

Top talent is in demand and their time is precious — the first stage of our process is an AI-led structured interview that you complete on your own schedule.

No calendar coordination, no waiting for a hiring manager's diary.

We use AI at this stage for three reasons: it removes the bias that compounds when the same person interviews twenty candidates in a day; it gives every candidate fresh evaluation rather than a tired afternoon conversation; and it holds a consistent standard so that what you are assessed on does not shift depending on who happens to be in the room.

The full process has three stages: the AI-led structured interview; an assessment evaluating your approach and output quality; and a live collaborative session with CornerstoneX leadership where we work through something real together.

AI is used to identify candidates and inform our research.

All final decisions are made by people.