Haseel — an early-stage AI-powered financial system being built for small businesses and freelancers across the MENA region — is looking for a Co-Founder and CTO to join as a core founding member and take full ownership of the technical direction, architecture, product development, and engineering team of the company. This is not a job. It is a founder opportunity — with significant equity, complete technical autonomy, and a direct co-founding partnership with the commercial founder from the company’s earliest stage. Haseel has already built its MVP and is entering the product validation and early user testing phase. The CTO co-founder will own how the platform is built, scaled, and evolved from here — leveraging AI, LLMs, automation, and cloud-native SaaS architecture to make financial operations smarter, simpler, and more connected for MENA’s underserved small business and freelancer market. This opportunity is open to Arab nationals only.
About Haseel — AI-Powered Financial System for MENA SMBs & Freelancers
Mission: Make financial operations — invoicing, payments, collections, and management — smarter, simpler, and more connected for MENA small businesses and freelancers through AI and automation
Problem: MENA SMBs waste significant time managing finances across spreadsheets, WhatsApp, email, and disconnected systems — Haseel replaces this with AI-powered automation
Stage: MVP built — now entering product validation and early user testing with real MENA SMB and freelancer users
Target Market: Small businesses and freelancers across MENA — a massive, underserved, and rapidly digitizing market for AI-powered financial automation
Technology Direction: AI-powered · LLM-assisted financial operations · SaaS · Cloud · API integrations with MENA financial platforms
This Is a Founder Opportunity — Not a Job
Equity: Significant founder-level equity — this is a co-founding appointment, not an employee hire
Autonomy: Complete technical autonomy — own the technology direction, architecture choices, tool selection, and engineering culture from day one
Partnership: Direct working relationship with the commercial founder — joint decision-making on product, market strategy, fundraising, and team building
Impact: You are not joining a company that exists. You are building a company that will exist because of what the founding team creates together
Application: Apply through LinkedIn or direct message to the Haseel founder
Opportunity Overview — Build Haseel’s Technical Foundation
This Co-Founder & CTO role at Haseel is a founding-stage co-founder appointment for a technically exceptional Arab engineer who thinks like a founder. You will own the complete technical direction and architecture; develop and improve the core product from MVP through to scalable SaaS; build AI-powered features and automation that make financial operations genuinely intelligent for MENA small businesses; design scalable backend and data infrastructure; integrate MENA financial platforms, payment systems, and APIs; establish engineering, testing, security, and deployment practices; work with the commercial founder on product and company strategy; and eventually build and lead the engineering team. The role requires strong backend or full-stack engineering experience, hands-on AI and LLM development capability, SaaS and cloud expertise, strong product thinking, and the entrepreneurial mindset to build fast with high ownership and limited resources.
Why This Haseel Co-Founder CTO Opportunity Is the Most Significant Arab FinTech Startup Career of 2026 in Dubai: Arab engineers with strong full-stack or backend engineering track records, hands-on AI and LLM capability, proven product launch experience, and the entrepreneurial mindset that a founding role demands — have a genuinely exceptional opportunity to own meaningful equity in an AI FinTech company targeting one of MENA’s most underserved and rapidly growing SMB financial markets, building alongside a committed co-founder with complete technical autonomy from the earliest founding stage. This is the kind of opportunity that defines careers and creates companies — not a role to evaluate cautiously, but a founding moment to seize decisively.
What You Will Build & Own
Technical Direction, Architecture & AI-Powered Product
- Own the complete technical direction and architecture of Haseel’s AI-powered financial platform — making the foundational architectural decisions (technology stack, data model, API patterns, cloud provider selection) that will define how the platform performs, scales, and evolves from early MVP through to a regional SaaS product serving thousands of MENA small businesses, applying the judgment that comes from having built and scaled real products rather than only designed theoretical systems
- Build AI-powered features and automation that make Haseel genuinely intelligent — implementing LLM-assisted invoice generation, automated payment follow-up workflows, intelligent financial anomaly detection, natural language financial query interfaces, and other automation capabilities that transform Haseel from a digital spreadsheet into a genuinely intelligent financial operating system that anticipates user needs and automates the repetitive tasks currently consuming MENA business owners’ time
- Design scalable backend and data infrastructure — building the cloud-native architecture, database design (SQL, NoSQL as appropriate), API layer, authentication system, multi-tenant SaaS data isolation, and data pipeline that support Haseel’s growth from initial users through to a scalable, performant, and reliable regional platform
- Integrate external financial platforms and APIs across the MENA ecosystem — connecting to payment gateways (HyperPay, Telr, Stripe MENA), banking APIs, accounting platforms, e-invoicing government systems (FATOORA, UAE FTA), and enterprise software integrations that make Haseel a genuinely integrated financial hub rather than another disconnected tool in MENA SMBs’ fragmented stack
Engineering Practices, Team Building & Co-Founder Partnership
- Establish engineering, testing, security, and deployment practices from the ground up — building the code review culture, CI/CD pipeline, automated testing strategy, security review process, and deployment infrastructure that ensures Haseel ships reliable, secure, and well-tested software consistently without accumulating the technical debt that early-stage startups commonly suffer when engineering practices are not established deliberately from the beginning
- Build quickly with limited resources and high ownership — applying the resourceful, pragmatic, and outcome-focused engineering approach that early-stage startup development requires, making intelligent trade-offs between engineering ideal and business reality, choosing the minimum viable technical solution that delivers maximum user value over the most architecturally complete solution that arrives too slowly to maintain company momentum
- Work directly with the commercial founder on product and company strategy — contributing the technical perspective to product prioritization, fundraising narrative, investor due diligence, and strategic partnership development, ensuring commercial strategy is grounded in technical reality and that market insights are efficiently translated into product and engineering priorities from day one
- Eventually build and lead the engineering team — transitioning from sole technical contributor to engineering team builder and leader as Haseel raises capital and grows, hiring, mentoring, and managing the engineers who will scale technical capability alongside user and revenue growth
What Haseel Is Looking For — Technical & Founder Profile
Engineering (Required): Strong backend or full-stack engineering experience — Node.js · Python · Go or equivalent | Experience building and launching real products users have actually used and returned to
SaaS & Cloud (Required): Strong SaaS architecture knowledge · Cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) · Database design · Multi-tenant SaaS patterns · API design | Ability to build quickly with limited resources
AI & Automation (Required): Hands-on experience with AI, LLMs, APIs, or automation — using OpenAI, Anthropic, or open-source LLMs to build real features | Prompt engineering · Orchestration frameworks | Automation workflow development
Product Thinking (Required): Strong product intuition — understanding of user needs, UX principles, and commercial judgment to prioritize features that drive adoption and retention rather than technical elegance alone
Founder Mindset (Required): High ownership · Strong initiative · Entrepreneurial mindset · Comfort with ambiguity and early-stage uncertainty | This is the most important requirement of all
FinTech (Plus): FinTech experience — payments, accounting, e-invoicing, SMB financial operations — is a plus. MENA market understanding of SMB financial challenges is highly valued regardless of formal FinTech background
Eligibility Requirements
- Arab national — this is a cultural and market-fit co-founder requirement specific to this stage of Haseel’s development and the MENA market it is building for
- Strong engineering track record — with verifiable examples of real products built, launched, and iterated based on actual user feedback, not just projects or prototypes
- Genuine entrepreneurial mindset — you understand what it means to own outcomes rather than execute tasks, and you are ready to take the risk and responsibility of a founding role
- Hands-on AI and LLM development experience — you have built things with AI that work in production, not merely explored AI as a concept or followed tutorial projects
About Haseel & AI FinTech Co-Founding in the MENA Region 2026
The MENA small business and freelancer financial management market is one of the most genuinely underserved, most commercially significant, and most AI-ready markets in the global FinTech landscape in 2026 — where millions of businesses are still managing invoices in WhatsApp, collections in spreadsheets, and payments across disconnected systems that AI can fundamentally transform. Haseel is being built to be the AI-powered financial operating system that changes this — and the Co-Founder & CTO who joins at this stage will be the engineer who makes it real. The combination of a clear and commercially significant problem, an MVP already built and entering real user validation, a committed commercial co-founder, a massive and underserved MENA target market, and the professional and financial outcomes that successful MENA FinTech startups have generated for their founding teams — makes this one of the most genuinely compelling startup founding moments available to Arab engineers in the Dubai and MENA technology ecosystem in 2026. If you have been waiting for the right problem, the right market, and the right co-founder to start something real — read this carefully.
Your Founding Path: Co-Founder & CTO (Founding Stage) → CTO (Seed / Series A) → Chief Technology Officer (Growth Stage) → Founder / Investor (Exit) — the startup founder’s path from co-founding through the company-building journey that creates careers, companies, and legacies in the MENA technology ecosystem.
Who Should Apply?
- Arab Backend/Full-Stack Engineers — Startup Aspirants: With 5+ years of strong engineering experience who have been waiting for the right co-founder partner and market opportunity to make the transition from senior engineer to technical co-founder — Haseel’s AI FinTech MENA mission may be the right vehicle
- Arab AI/LLM Product Builders: Who have built AI-powered products or LLM-integrated applications and want to apply their AI engineering capability at the founding level of a MENA-focused AI FinTech startup with a commercially significant and personally meaningful problem to solve
- Arab SaaS Engineers — FinTech Adjacent: With strong SaaS architecture and cloud infrastructure backgrounds who want to co-found a company in the MENA FinTech space with a committed commercial partner and complete technical ownership
- Arab CTO-Track Engineers — Ready for Founder Step: Technically ready for the CTO challenge, looking for the right co-founder partnership, market opportunity, and product mission to make the founder leap from senior engineering role to startup co-founder
- Arab Engineers — MENA SMB Understanding: Who have personal or professional experience with the financial operations challenges MENA small businesses and freelancers face and want to build the technology solution that addresses them at regional scale
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