Director Digital Engineering📣 Job Ad

About the Role

Qiddiya is seeking a Director Digital Engineering to provide technical leadership across its core digital product streams. Based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this full-time role is responsible for ensuring that all platforms, services, and digital capabilities are designed and delivered to the highest engineering standards. The Director will ensure digital products are built with a reusable, scalable, resilient, reliable, observable, and extensible architecture that can be leveraged across multiple Qiddiya assets.

Role Context and Objectives

This position involves setting the technical direction, challenging low-level engineering decisions, and governing solution quality to meet Qiddiya Investment Company's defined standards. Operating within a multi-vendor delivery environment, the Director will play a critical role in aligning vendors, engineering teams, and embedded technical leaders with Qiddiya's technology strategy, architecture principles, and operating model.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the technical oversight of Qiddiya's core digital product streams, ensuring alignment with target architecture, engineering standards, and long-term technology vision.
• Define and enforce engineering principles including reusability, scalability, resiliency, reliability, observability, maintainability, security, and performance across all digital products.
• Ensure all technical decisions are reviewed, challenged, and validated by Qiddiya, maintaining clear ownership and governance over architecture and engineering direction.
• Act as a senior technical authority capable of engaging at low-level design, architecture, code, integration, infrastructure, and operational decision-making levels.
• Challenge vendor proposals, solution designs, implementation approaches, and technical trade-offs to ensure Qiddiya retains control over critical engineering decisions.
• Ensure digital products are built as reusable capabilities extensible across multiple Qiddiya assets, avoiding isolated implementations.
• Drive the creation of reusable patterns, components, services, APIs, integration approaches, and engineering guidelines to support product scalability.
• Partner with architecture, product, delivery, DevSecOps, cloud, and security teams to align product delivery with the overall digital target state.
• Lead and manage Staff Software Engineers embedded within product streams, working closely with vendor teams.
• Set clear expectations for Staff Engineers regarding technical governance, architecture review, engineering excellence, code quality, observability, resiliency, and vendor challenge.
• Ensure Staff Engineers actively influence product delivery, review technical decisions, and protect Qiddiya's long-term technology interests.
• Build internal engineering capability to reduce dependency on vendors for critical technical decisions and strengthen Qiddiya's ownership of its digital platforms.

Qualifications and Experience

• Significant experience (+10 years) in senior engineering leadership roles, preferably within large-scale digital platforms, e-commerce, entertainment, travel, hospitality, fintech, or high-traffic consumer digital environments.
• Strong hands-on technical background with the ability to challenge detailed engineering, architecture, integration, infrastructure, and implementation decisions.
• Proven experience leading engineering teams in a complex multi-vendor or system integrator delivery model.
• Strong experience governing the delivery of reusable digital platforms, shared services, APIs, and scalable product architectures.
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering practices, DevSecOps, cloud-native architecture, observability, resiliency, reliability engineering, and secure-by-design delivery.
• Experience working with executive stakeholders and translating technical risks, trade-offs, and recommendations into clear business and delivery decisions.

Work Type and Location

This is a full-time position based in Riyadh, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The role operates within a dynamic environment, collaborating with various internal teams and external vendors.

Application Process

Candidates meeting the specified qualifications are encouraged to apply for this leadership role at Qiddiya.