From IT help desk to CTO of the Middle East's top coffee app

A help-desk job nobody wanted

Muzamil opens the third episode recorded from the Dubai studio with a confession about the format — the guest’s video was lost, so on YouTube there is only an audio waveform where Shahood Siddiqui’s face should be. He keeps the conversation anyway, calling it one of his favourite episodes of the last hundred. The reason is the shape of Shahood’s career. He took a job that, for a computer-science graduate, is the bottom of the food chain — an IT help desk in Saudi Arabia — and six years later walked away as group CTO of one of the country’s larger family-owned groups, leading around eighty people.

Before any of that, the story winds back to Al-Khobar. Shahood was born in Karachi, moved to Saudi Arabia as a child, and grew up in the Eastern Province — the region that, because of Aramco and Sabic, generates most of the kingdom’s revenue and held a strong, tight Pakistani community. The school in Al-Khobar sat at the centre of that community; every child walked to it, and every street had cricket running in it. His grandfather’s house, his cousins, and a clear family expectation pulled him back to Karachi at sixteen to finish his FSc and aim, as everyone in the family had always assumed he would, at NED.

A government university you cannot study at

The admission to NED was almost arbitrary. Nobody in the family knew what programme he should take; the goal was simply NED. Sitting in an auditorium with his father, with only two faculties open at his marks — computer science and biomedical — they decided on the walk to the stage. His aunt’s first reaction at home was to console him: computer science meant he was not even in the engineering faculty, and with a year’s effort he might transfer to petroleum or electronics. By the time he graduated, it was the mechanical and electrical students who were left behind.

What he found at NED was a brighter version of a familiar Pakistani problem. The students were genuinely sharp — seventy to a class, drawn from every corner of Karachi. The teaching was not. His sharpest memory of his first week is the dean lifting a shoe to a student in the front row, a fear tactic that bought silence but not learning. Most lecturers, he says, could not be heard at all. Programming, he points out, cannot be taught on a blackboard — a teacher who writes a full program in chalk has spent forty-five minutes writing and lost the room. Six students in the class took notes; everyone else photocopied them.

So Shahood made a different bet. He decided he could not study in that environment, and instead spent his first six months networking — a hundred useful people, he reasoned, must exist across four years stacked in one building. He joined every event, learned event management and sponsorship, and taught himself the fundamentals of programming on the side. By the end of first year he understood the logic well enough to keep building from Google and GitHub.

Working before graduating

In his second year he went looking for professional experience, because he could feel the gap between knowing what JavaScript is and knowing how a web product is actually assembled and shipped. He used his network. He went to seniors already working at a software house, told them he wanted no salary and no formal internship, and asked only to be allowed to sit with them. It is, he tells Muzamil, the single thing that separated him from the rest of his batch — he started working professionally far earlier than anyone else.

The work was unglamorous: backend development in PHP for a company doing SMS marketing for global clients, later Facebook apps and games for brands in the FarmVille era, then Android. He was promoted to senior Android developer. Around graduation he tried something of his own — an institute opposite NED’s gate, on the top floor of a school, meant to teach students the practical, employable skills the university skipped. He marketed it on the names and photographs of the working professionals who would teach. The execution, he admits, was a child’s. He ended up teaching most of the courses himself, burning cash without satisfying students or generating a return, and shut it down.

Cleaning routers as a software engineer

In 2016, while most of his batch prepared for masters degrees in Australia and the United States, a senior called from Al-Khobar with a job. Shahood weighed America against a return to Saudi Arabia — where his fiancée and childhood friends were — and chose Khobar, partly on instinct. The offer was barely above his Pakistani salary, which should have been a warning. The title was IT help desk.

On his first day, a forty-year-old group was cutting an anniversary cake. He was handed a tour of where the keyboards and cables and routers lived. People shouted across the office that their email signatures were broken. A software engineer who would not install his own laptop’s operating system because that was beneath him was now the man fixing other people’s mail. Muzamil draws the analogy plainly: it is like studying automotive engineering in Germany, working at Mercedes, then coming home to take a job as a mechanic.

Shahood does not pretend it was anyone’s fault but his own. He had read the job title; he knew what an IT help desk was. Two things stopped him from packing up. He had burned his bridges to get there. And the group’s culture turned out to be unusually open — an open-door policy where the bottom of the food chain could walk into the CEO’s office, and a CEO in his late thirties with a single, loudly repeated vision: digitalise the entire offline business over the next five years.

Turning offline into a CTO seat

The vision had been decided in slides before Shahood arrived. What it lacked was anyone to execute it. That gap was his opening. The group was the largest trader of commercial kitchen equipment in the country — the supplier behind everyone from McDonald’s to Dunkin’ — running a near-monopoly entirely offline, without even a real website. Selling a seventy-thousand-riyal machine online sounded absurd; buyers expected to inspect equipment in person and keep an account manager on call. But the first small B2C category they listed sold, and the first-year B2B target was hit in three to four months.

From there the targets, the competition, and the team all grew. He built a digital department that ran like a startup inside the group — a separate apartment, its own KPIs and revenue targets, a culture where every day had to matter. He stood up a software house in Karachi to host the engineering team delivering the work. He rose from help-desk technician to group CTO with roughly eighty people reporting to him, and he is careful to credit both the hard work and the luck of landing in the right industry at the right moment, when returns on effort were exponential.

By 2022 everything was on autopilot — his child settled in school, his wife working, the team structured enough to deliver with or without him. That, he says, was the problem. After four portfolios with no appetite for a fifth, he was bored, and boredom in a career is a signal he now gives everyone as advice: loyalty does not mean refusing to listen to opportunities. He took a Dubai offer to his employer openly and asked them to help him decide. The pull was a five-hour conversation with a new CEO who laid out exactly what his technology team was missing and what it had to achieve in three years.

A coffee app and a gym ERP

The move was a jump from group CTO to startup CTO — from a comfortable, established seat to a hit-or-miss bet. The startup has since raised a fifteen-million-dollar round at a hundred-million-dollar valuation. OneTech Capital, where Shahood is CTO, runs as a startup studio: it builds several products, keeps majority ownership and operations in its own hands, and reuses one investor ecosystem across each new venture, with the goal of building, scaling, and eventually exiting rather than chasing a single billion-dollar dream.

The flagship is the coffee app. In the Gulf, Shahood says, “coffee is the next petrol” — the demand is enormous, and on-demand platforms now orient themselves around it. The product tries to solve every path a person has to a cup: pickup from a shop, delivery through partners, beans and machines and accessories for home brewing, and subscriptions for the daily drinker who wants to save forty or fifty percent. The company does not run its own delivery fleet. What it does lead, across the entire Middle East, is coffee pickup — more pickup orders than any platform, including ones ten or twenty years older. The second portfolio, AllUp, is an ERP for gyms: face-recognition check-ins, class and seat management, trainer content, flexible pay-per-visit revenue models, and an in-app store, sold to gyms in both Saudi Arabia and Dubai that were otherwise running on Excel.

The engineering team across both products runs to around eighty or ninety people, most of them Pakistani — engineers Shahood handpicked from his own network and moved over — with developers also in Egypt, Turkey, and Russia.

Why Pakistan is the only nation missing from the room

The back half of the conversation is the part Muzamil flags as essential, and it is uncomfortable. Shahood’s verdict on Pakistani talent is split. At its best it is outstanding: under startup pressure, when a problem that should take three days has to ship today, a good Pakistani engineer finds a workaround and gets it to production, flawless. But only about twenty in a hundred can compete internationally. The other eighty are held back less by raw ability than by grooming — they do not know how to communicate, how to keep learning past one technology, how to carry themselves.

Muzamil and Shahood both land on soft skills and professional ethics as the real gap. There is, Shahood argues, no excuse a global employer accepts. Pakistan is the only country where developers pay no tax on their salaries, which makes its engineers cheaper to hire; yet the only complaints he ever receives — never from Turkey or Egypt — are about strikes, load-shedding, and dropped internet. If international money is paying you, he says, you invest in the backup: fibre plus a wireless connection, so the light going out never disconnects you. The interview process makes the grooming problem visible. Candidates record video answers; the funny ones get passed around the office — applicants lying on a bed in a vest, laptop balanced on a chair, washing hung over the door behind them, technically sound and entirely unaware that the person judging them is not Pakistani and is judging the country too.

The numbers underneath are stark. Pakistan talks about ten billion dollars of IT exports; reaching it needs roughly a million engineers, and the country produces eighty thousand to a hundred thousand a year, of whom only a slice are internationally employable. The smartest students were not even choosing computer science — merit lists still put mechanical and electrical above it — and the ones who did often got the worst of the teaching. A senior engineer sitting at home anywhere in the world can earn five to seven thousand dollars a month from a Gulf company; the studio would rather pay twenty people working remotely than seat a hundred in one Dubai room. Shahood keeps returning to a contrast with India, where one professional pulls another up, a community that helps its own. He notes, without drama, that across his next several months of panels and award ceremonies he is the only Pakistani in the room.

Build the city, then go home

Muzamil closes by widening the lens to the region. The Middle East, he argues, is one of the few places not sliding toward chaos — sitting on cash it is now investing inward, choosing collaboration over competition, and progressive enough to know oil will not last and that technology is how it weans off. Shahood agrees the next five years make the combined Middle East the biggest economy he can see, and that new cities are not just construction; they are infrastructure that becomes a centre for the whole world.

The opportunity for Pakistan, India, and the rest of South Asia is proximity — the same advantage that brought those communities in during the oil boom of the early eighties, when the kingdom first trusted them to build it. This transformation is technology-first, and the trust is already there. The catch is readiness. If Pakistan is not prepared for the services Saudi Arabia and the UAE will need — cashier-free stores wired with hundreds of cameras, fully AI-driven retail already being demoed — it will be valuable neither to the Gulf now nor to any transformation that follows.

The closing note is the one Shahood wants Pakistani listeners to sit with. Saudi Arabia is not asking anyone to stay. Its offer is to come, build its cities, take the money and the value, and go home again. That, he says, is the thin line every engineer has to decide on — whether to make yourself good enough to be part of it, knowing you will be sent back when the work is done.