Director Major Events Operations📣 Job Ad

About the Role

Qiddiya is seeking a Director Major Events Operations to provide senior leadership in the planning, readiness, and delivery of public realm event operations across Qiddiya City. This full-time role, based in Riyadh, serves as the second-in-charge to the Executive Director, Major Events. The Director translates the Major Events strategy into coordinated city-wide operating plans, ensuring public spaces, city services, temporary event infrastructure, and operational partners are integrated, safe, guest-focused, and ready for delivery. Acting on behalf of the Executive Director when delegated, this role leads cross-functional coordination, drives decisions, and provides operational assurance from early planning through live event delivery 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 activities, 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, maintaining clear scope boundaries with City Operations and asset/venue operators.

Integrated City Coordination and Operations

• Coordinate planning across City Operations, districts, venues, 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 to support timely resolution of cross-functional issues.
• Develop and manage an integrated operational readiness framework, including 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.
• 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.
• 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 across the event portfolio.
• Lead structured post-event reviews, capture evidence-based lessons, and convert agreed improvements into accountable actions for future events.

Qualifications and Experience

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Event Management, Operations Management, Business, Engineering, Facilities Management, Hospitality, or a related discipline. A postgraduate qualification in a relevant field is desirable, as is relevant professional certification in project, programme, event, safety, risk, or emergency management.
• Experience: Over 10 years of senior leadership experience in planning and delivering complex, high-profile events, festivals, sporting events, entertainment destinations, or city-scale operations.
• Demonstrated experience leading public realm or city-side event operations across multiple functions, suppliers, and stakeholder organisations.
• Proven experience acting as a deputy or senior operational lead, with authority to coordinate teams, make time-critical decisions, and represent executive leadership when delegated.
• Experience developing operational plans, readiness frameworks, command-and-control arrangements, testing and rehearsal programmes, and post-event improvement plans.
• Strong commercial and supplier-management experience, including scope development, procurement support, mobilisation, performance management, and budget oversight.

Preferred Background

• Experience in Saudi Arabia or the GCC, and familiarity with large-scale destination or giga-project environments.
• Background with 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.
• Delivery exposure to both planned major events and live operational environments requiring multi-agency coordination and rapid issue resolution.