Innovation, Ecosystems & Partnerships

Job Description

Role Purpose:

The Director of Innovation & Partnerships leads the strategy, sourcing and selection of technology-led innovation and ecosystem collaborations to drive growth, efficiency, and competitive advantage. This role builds and manages an innovation pipeline—from horizon scanning and ideation through proof-of-concept, incubation, and scaled implementation plans—grounded in business outcomes and measurable value.

Partnering closely with Product Managements, PMO, Software Engineering, Data and AI, Security, Enterprise IT, and business partners, the director orchestrates a portfolio of internal tech initiatives and external partnerships, establishes engagement models, mitigates technology and delivery risk, and fosters a culture of experimentation and operational excellence across the TIDES organization.

Key Accountabilities:

1- Strategic Leadership;

• Define the technology innovation vision aligned with TIDES enterprise strategy.
• Build multi-horizon roadmap balancing quick wins with transformational bets.
• Translate market, customer, and tech trends into prioritized opportunity areas.
• Focus on transforming high-level strategic initiatives provided by the CDTO into concrete, actionable plans and outcomes.

2- Technology Sourcing & Evaluation;

• Run structured scouting for emerging tech (e.g., AI/ML, cloud-native, cybersecurity, data platforms, edge/IoT).
• Lead technical due diligence, feasibility studies, documentations, and reference checks.
• Maintain a curated radar of technologies with adoption recommendations.

3- Innovation Portfolio Management;

• Stand up and run an end-to-end discovery: POCs, pilots, incubation, and scale.
• Establish stage gates, success criteria, and “kill/continue/scale” decisions.
• Ensure traceability from business problems to outcomes, benefits, and ROI.

4- Partnerships & Ecosystem Development;

• Work with external vendors and internal partners across the organization to ensure effective partnership management practice and high-quality delivery.
• Negotiate MOUs, co-development agreements, and joint Go-to-Market GTM models with clear value exchange.
• Create an operating cadence for partner governance, performance, and risk management.
• Lead the development of new partnerships/initiatives and programs, from concept to hand it over to PMO.

5- Objectives and Key Results (OKR) Management;

• Lead the design and implementation of the OKR framework across TIDES organization.
• Partner with the SMT and department leads to translate organizational vision and strategic priorities into aligned team and individual OKRs.
• Monitor progress against OKRs, build dashboards to visualize performance trends, and provide regular, data-driven insights and reports to executives to ensure accountability.

Skills

• Proficiency in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
• Experience in planning and leading large-scale and initiatives –with certifications like PMP or Agile.
• Experience in technology evaluation and selection.
• Strong in managing relationships with external partners and vendors.
• Demonstrate experience in leading cross-functional project teams.
• Encourages creativity and innovation, developing new ideas and solutions
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including presentation skills
• Analytical, troubleshooting and problem solving skills.
• Proactively identifies business issues and develops creative solutions
• Innovative and big picture thinker.
• Ability to work on both short term objectives and long term strategic planning
• Ability to prioritize and manage the workload
• Strong coaching and change management capabilities.
• Language (Arabic/English).
• Strong organization and time-management, project management skills.
• Self-motivated and self-directed.
• Detail-oriented.
• Understanding the importance of working in an open, collaborative, multicultural, high-integrity office.
• Good knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) is essential
• Familiarity with and ability to leverage AI, machine learning, and blockchain for competitive advantage.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Information Technology, MIS