Head of Infrastructure & Data Platform

About Soar

Soar is a SAMA-regulated Saudi home-finance platform. The company is seeking a Head of Infrastructure & Data Platform to lead its infrastructure, DevOps operations, and data platform. This full-time role is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and involves accountability for reliability, secure and fast delivery to production, and a trusted Snowflake-based data stack.

Role Overview

The Head of Infrastructure & Data Platform will report to the CTO and lead the DevOps and data engineering teams across Cairo and Riyadh. This leadership position requires a hands-on approach to managing critical systems and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Infrastructure: Own cloud architecture (GCP, KSA-resident production), networking, zero-trust access, and cost management. Set and meet SLOs for uptime, latency, and recovery, including incident response, on-call duties, and blameless post-mortems. Ensure infrastructure compliance with SAMA CSF, data-residency, and audit requirements, collaborating with Security and GRC teams.
• DevOps: Manage end-to-end CI/CD and deployment pipelines, covering build, test gates, release, rollback, and environment parity across dev, UAT, and production. Standardise infrastructure as code, Kubernetes, Cloud Run practices, secrets management, and change control. Implement comprehensive observability through logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting to identify issues proactively.
• Data Platform: Oversee the Snowflake warehouse and broader data infrastructure, including ingestion, pipelines, modelling, orchestration, and access controls. Deliver reliable, governed data for finance, risk, regulatory reporting, and analytics, ensuring data quality and lineage. Manage data security, PII handling, retention, and residency in accordance with SAMA and PDPL regulations.
• Leadership: Recruit, develop, and lead DevOps and data engineers, defining the team's roadmap, standards, and budgets. Collaborate with Product Engineering, QA, Security, and business stakeholders on priorities and readiness for each go-live.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Over 10 years of experience in infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps, with at least 3 years in a team leadership role.
• Extensive hands-on experience with a major cloud provider (GCP preferred), Kubernetes, Terraform, and modern CI/CD practices.
• Demonstrated ownership of production reliability for high-availability, customer-facing platforms.
• Strong experience managing Snowflake or a comparable cloud data warehouse, along with data pipeline tooling.
• Experience in a regulated environment such as fintech, banking, or payments, including familiarity with security and compliance controls.
• Clear communication skills, capable of translating technical risks into business decisions.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience with SAMA, PDPL, ISO 27001, or PCI DSS, and KSA data-residency setups.
• Proficiency with dbt, Airflow or Dagster, streaming technologies like Kafka or Pub/Sub, and Snowflake cost optimisation.
• Experience with zero-trust networking (*, Twingate), WAF/Cloud Armor, and SOC integration.
• Exposure to mortgage, lending, or core banking systems.
• Arabic language skills.

Work Environment

This role is a full-time position based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with leadership responsibilities extending to teams in Cairo. The successful candidate will operate within a regulated financial technology environment.