Director Major Events Operations📣 Job Ad

About the Role

The Director, Major Events Operations, serves as the second-in-charge to the Executive Director, Major Events, at Qiddiya Investment Company in Riyadh. This full-time role provides senior leadership across the planning, readiness, and delivery of public realm event operations throughout Qiddiya City. The Director translates the Major Events strategy into coordinated city-wide operating plans, ensuring that public spaces, city services, temporary event infrastructure, and operational partners are integrated, safe, guest-focused, and ready for delivery. When delegated, the Director acts on behalf of the Executive Director, leading cross-functional coordination, driving decisions and escalations, and providing operational assurance from early planning through live event delivery, demobilisation, and post-event review.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as the principal deputy to the Executive Director, Major Events, providing continuity of leadership and representing the function in delegated forums and decision-making bodies.
• Support the definition of the Major Events operating model, priorities, annual programme, and resource plan, converting strategic direction into clear workstreams and delivery milestones.
• Lead, coach, and coordinate assigned Major Events team members and consultants, setting expectations, monitoring performance, and resolving delivery constraints.
• Prepare concise executive briefings, recommendations, and decision papers on readiness, risks, dependencies, budget, and operational performance.
• Lead the development and integration of public realm event operations plans for city-wide and district-level activity, covering waste, cleansing, temporary structures, wayfinding, guest services, accessibility, security, emergency interfaces, welfare, logistics, and event support services.
• Establish event-specific concepts of operations, operating procedures, deployment plans, service schedules, resource assumptions, zone plans, and escalation protocols appropriate to event scale and risk.
• Ensure plans address the complete event lifecycle, including build-up, testing, event days, transition, breakdown, reinstatement, and close-out.
• Maintain clear scope boundaries between City Operations and asset or venue operators, coordinating city-side interfaces and dependencies without assuming responsibility for direct venue operation.

Integrated City Coordination and Governance

• Coordinate planning across City Operations, districts, venues and assets, mobility, security, emergency services, technology, facilities management, public realm, utilities, guest experience, commercial, procurement, and external stakeholders.
• Establish and manage governance routines, integrated planning workshops, action trackers, decision logs, interface registers, and reporting cycles that support timely closure of cross-functional issues.
• Confirm ownership of interfaces and hand-offs between permanent city operations, temporary event overlays, venue operations, and third-party delivery partners.
• Escalate material decisions, unresolved dependencies, and changes in scope to the Executive Director with clear options and recommended actions.

Operational Readiness and Delivery

• Develop and manage an integrated operational readiness framework, including readiness criteria, evidence requirements, assurance reviews, testing, rehearsals, simulations, inspections, and go/no-go recommendations.
• Own the consolidated Major Events operational risk, issue, dependency, and opportunity process for assigned events, ensuring accountable owners, mitigations, due dates, and escalation thresholds are defined.
• Challenge plans for practicality, capacity, resilience, accessibility, guest impact, health and safety, security, environmental performance, and continuity of essential city services.
• Provide senior operational leadership during event periods and, when delegated, lead the city-side event operations function within the agreed command, control, and communication structure.
• Coordinate public realm operational deployment, monitor service performance and city conditions, resolve cross-functional issues, and maintain an accurate common operating picture for leadership.
• Ensure incidents, service failures, and emerging risks are logged, triaged, escalated, and communicated through approved protocols.
• Oversee orderly demobilisation and public realm reinstatement, confirming defects, outstanding actions, service recovery needs, and hand-back requirements.

Commercial and Partner Management

• Define operational scopes, service requirements, performance standards, and evaluation inputs for consultants, suppliers, and event delivery partners supporting public realm operations.
• Support procurement planning, tender evaluation, mobilisation, and contract governance, working with Commercial and Procurement to protect programme, quality, value, and accountability.
• Monitor supplier readiness and delivery against contractual obligations, service levels, and event requirements, escalating shortfalls and coordinating corrective action.
• Validate operational budget assumptions, forecasts, change requests, and cost pressures for assigned workstreams, providing recommendations to the Executive Director.
• Develop repeatable standards, templates, playbooks, checklists, and reporting tools that strengthen Qiddiya City’s Major Events capability and support consistent delivery.
• Build strong working relationships with internal functions, government entities, emergency services, operators, promoters, and delivery partners.
• Lead structured post-event reviews, capture evidence-based lessons, and convert agreed improvements into accountable actions for future events.

Candidate Profile

• Experience gained from major event organising committees, destination or city operations, event promoters, venue or precinct operators, government event authorities, integrated facilities management, or specialist event operations consultancies.
• Demonstrated delivery exposure to both planned major events and live operational environments requiring multi-agency coordination and rapid issue resolution.