Role summary
Qiddiya Digital is seeking a highly experienced and hands-on Senior Expert Software Engineer to take technical ownership of critical digital product domains. This is a senior individual contributor role with strong technical authority, providing technical leadership to vendor engineering teams while maintaining accountability for platform quality, resilience, reliability, security, performance, and operational readiness. A key objective is to eliminate black-box delivery, retain critical knowledge within Qiddiya, and ensure Qiddiya maintains full control of its digital platforms.
Responsibilities
- Take end-to-end technical ownership of the assigned digital domain
- Define and maintain the target architecture, engineering standards, and technical roadmap
- Provide hands-on technical leadership across design, implementation, integration, release, and production operations
- Lead and challenge vendor engineering teams, ensuring compliance with Qiddiya Digital standards
- Review and approve architecture, APIs, data models, integrations, code quality, and major technical decisions
- Validate vendor deliverables using clear acceptance criteria and measurable technical evidence
- Ensure solutions are resilient, reliable, scalable, secure, observable, maintainable, and cost efficient
- Define and monitor technical KPIs, service-level objectives, availability, latency, recovery, and performance targets
- Ensure appropriate automated testing, CI/CD controls, monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting are in place
- Validate release plans, rollout strategies, rollback procedures, capacity testing, disaster recovery, and production readiness
- Lead technical incident management, root-cause analysis, and permanent remediation
- Identify and manage technical debt, architectural risks, recurring incidents, and operational weaknesses
- Maintain architecture documentation, technical decisions, runbooks, and support procedures
- Drive knowledge transfer and ensure Qiddiya can independently operate and evolve the platform
- Promote reusable capabilities and common engineering practices across Qiddiya's digital assets
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline
- Extensive software-engineering experience in a Lead, Staff, Principal Engineer, Technical Lead, or senior architecture role
- Strong hands-on engineering capability and the ability to challenge implementation-level decisions
- Experience designing and operating large-scale, distributed, cloud-native, and highly available platforms
- Experience with customer-facing digital products, commerce, payments, loyalty, identity, ticketing, mobile, or similar platforms
- Strong knowledge of APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, distributed systems, data consistency, and failure recovery
- Strong experience with resilience, observability, performance engineering, security, automated testing, CI/CD, and production operations
- Proven experience overseeing vendors, system integrators, or outsourced engineering teams
- Strong incident-management, root-cause-analysis, and problem-management experience
- Strong communication, stakeholder-management, and technical decision-making skills
Education
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline
Experience
Extensive software-engineering experience in a Lead, Staff, Principal Engineer, Technical Lead, or senior architecture role
Skills
- APIs
- Microservices
- Event-driven architecture
- Distributed systems
- Data consistency
- Failure recovery
- Resilience
- Observability
- Performance engineering
- Security
- Automated testing
- CI/CD
- Production operations
- Incident management
- Root-cause analysis
- Problem management
- Communication
- Stakeholder management
- Technical decision-making