Technical Lead

Technical Lead — part-time to full-time

MEDirect · Riyadh or remote (Gulf / Egypt / Jordan) · Reports to the CEO

The company

MEDirect gives licensed physicians in Saudi Arabia their own independent virtual clinic — their brand, their patients, their pricing. Patients book, pay and consult by video. Doctors consult, prescribe and order labs.

The vision, plainly: build the infrastructure that gives doctors the same room and flexibility every other profession already has.

How this role starts — read this first

We're doing this in two phases, deliberately, and we'd rather be straight about why.

Phase 1 — part-time, starting now. 5–10 hours a week. You are our technical authority over an external engineering partner currently delivering against a retainer. You review their work, decide what gets accepted, and own the technical calls. We have a platform relaunch targeted for late October and nobody on our side who can judge whether what we're being handed is good. That is the job, immediately.

Phase 2 — full-time, on close of our funding round. We're raising a pre-seed extension now. On close, this converts to a full-time role with meaningful equity, and you take ownership of the entire technical estate.

Why phased: we'd rather pay you properly for real work now than make you a promise contingent on a round neither of us controls. And it gives both of us a working quarter to find out whether this fits before either side commits.

If the round doesn't close on the timeline we expect, phase 1 continues month to month. We'll tell you exactly where the raise stands on the first call.

What you'd own

In phase 1:

• Reviewing and accepting the external partner's output — you sign off, not us
• Writing the technical scope they work against
• A weekly written read on what shipped, what's at risk, what we should stop
• The technical calls on the relaunch

From phase 2:

• Every line of code in the company. Two platforms, roughly 115,000 lines between them
• Deployment, migrations, monitoring — none of which exists yet
• The payment path that lets a physician subscribe without anyone touching a database
• The convergence plan for the two platforms and the architecture decisions inside it
• Data protection under Saudi PDPL, in a system holding patient records

What you're inheriting

Two platforms:

• A live Python/Flask + React system with MySQL on Oracle Cloud in Riyadh, built by an external vendor, serving real patients
• A second Flask + React platform built in-house — full EMR, coded diagnoses, a provider network, a billing ledger — further ahead clinically, not yet deployed

Both have written technical handover reports: architecture, dependencies, effort estimates, and a candid account of everything half-built. Y

ou'll read them under NDA before you decide.

We paid for an honest audit of our own code and then read it.

This is a custody role before it is a building role.

The systems work and have users. What they don't have is anyone who can say what's running, change it safely, or put it back when it breaks.

What we're looking for

• 6+ years building and running production web systems, including time owning something you didn't write
• Python (Flask or Django) and React to production depth, comfortable being responsible for both
• You've been the client-side technical authority over an agency or vendor — written the scope, rejected the work, held the line. This is the whole of phase 1
• You've taken a system to production yourself. You know what a migration, a rollback and a 2am incident feel like
• Security literacy. The ability to look at an endpoint and understand the consequence without being told
• You can explain a technical risk to a non-technical founder in a way that produces a decision
• You use AI daily and seriously. Part of what you're inheriting was built that way. Curiosity about that is a requirement; contempt for it is a mismatch
• Arabic and English. The product is bilingual, the physicians are Arabic-speaking, the codebase is English
• You can genuinely commit 5–10 hours a week from the start, and if you're employed elsewhere, your contract allows paid outside work. We'll ask to see the clause

Strong advantages: payment gateway integration with webhooks and reconciliation. Healthcare or any regulated domain. Saudi regulatory context — NPHIES, PDPL, ICD-10-AM, SCFHS.

Not required: Kubernetes, microservices, ML, mobile, a CS degree, or having held the title before.

We will not ask you to

• Rewrite it from scratch. It works and it has users
• Ship features in your first month
• Work without context. There are written handovers, an OpenAPI spec, a demo runbook, and a founder who answers the same day

This is probably not for you if

• You want to build before you understand what's already there
• You'd rather manage than build. You'll do both, and mostly build
• You need a team around you
• You've spent most of your career in large enterprise or government IT — different discipline, both valid, not this one

Terms

Phase 1: flat retainer, 5–10 hours a week, month to month, 30 days' notice either side. No equity in this phase — deliberately.

Phase 2, on close: full-time, monthly salary, plus equity (shares of the ownership in the company) on a four-year vest with a twelve-month cliff, vesting backdated to your phase 1 start date so the early work counts.

Direct line to the founder. No layers.

Process

Apply directly and/or Send a short note to alwaleed@medirect.link covering:

1. A production system you inherited and didn't write — what you stabilised, and one thing you deliberately left broken
2. A time you told a vendor or agency their work wasn't good enough, and what happened
3. Your current commitments, and confirmation you can give 5–10 hours a week
4. Anything you've shipped that we can look at

Then: a 30-minute call → both handover documents under NDA → a paid exercise (SAR 1,000) → a conversation about it.