Trade Finance Lead (Saudi National)

About Astek Middle East

Astek Middle East is part of Astek, a global engineering and technology consulting group established in France in 1988. The group operates across five continents, with the Middle East entity providing IT and technology services in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan. Astek supports clients in sectors including public and government, healthcare, transportation, banking, retail, airlines, and tourism. With 10,000 employees worldwide and €620 million in revenue in 2023, Astek focuses on digital transformation and complex systems engineering.

Role Overview

Astek Middle East is seeking a Trade Finance Lead (Saudi National) to join its team in Al Khobar, Eastern Province. This full-time role involves leading the development, implementation, integration, and ongoing support of enterprise financial and trading applications within a banking environment. The position requires 2-5 years of experience and combines technical expertise in trade finance or trading platforms with application lifecycle management, system integration, troubleshooting, and production support.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead requirements gathering, analysis, design, development, implementation, and maintenance of business-critical applications.
• Identify opportunities for business process improvement and implement system enhancements.
• Lead second-level application support, including issue investigation, root-cause analysis, troubleshooting, and vendor coordination.
• Coordinate testing, defect resolution, and system changes to ensure timely and effective delivery.
• Collaborate with business and operations teams, IT support, QA, systems integration teams, project managers, and external service providers.
• Support project planning, technical design, application development, and systems integration.
• Ensure system changes comply with applicable security, audit, PCI DSS, and regulatory requirements.
• Coordinate with infrastructure teams to ensure appropriate hardware, software, storage, and network capabilities.
• Lead technical activities for application certification and compliance with security and regulatory frameworks.
• Guide development, testing, deployment, and implementation activities, reviewing completed work for quality and effectiveness.
• Support application performance, capacity planning, system availability, and long-term platform optimization.
• Provide technical guidance, knowledge sharing, and mentoring to team members.
• Support production deployments and off-hours activities when required.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• 2-5 years of experience in a relevant field.
• Strong technical expertise in trade finance or trading platforms.
• Experience with application lifecycle management, system integration, troubleshooting, and production support.
• Ability to work closely with business stakeholders, IT teams, quality assurance teams, infrastructure teams, and external technology vendors.

Work Environment and Collaboration

This role involves extensive collaboration with business stakeholders, internal technology teams, vendors, and service providers. Flexibility to support deployments and application issues outside standard working hours may be required to ensure system reliability and performance.