Senior Expert Software Engineer (Checkout)📣 Job Ad

About the Role

Qiddiya Digital is seeking a Senior Expert Software Engineer (Checkout) to join their team in Riyadh. This full-time individual contributor role involves taking comprehensive technical ownership of critical digital product domains within Qiddiya's ecosystem, specifically focusing on the Checkout platform. The position provides technical leadership to vendor engineering teams, ensuring the quality, resilience, reliability, security, performance, and operational readiness of the assigned platform. A key objective is to eliminate black-box delivery, retain critical knowledge within Qiddiya, and ensure the company maintains full control over its digital platforms.

Key Responsibilities

• Take end-to-end technical ownership of the assigned digital domain.
• Define and maintain the target architecture, engineering standards, and technical roadmap.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership across design, implementation, integration, release, and production operations.
• Ensure solutions are resilient, reliable, scalable, secure, observable, maintainable, and cost-efficient.
• Define and monitor technical KPIs, service-level objectives, availability, latency, recovery, and performance targets.
• Ensure appropriate automated testing, CI/CD controls, monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting are in place.
• Validate release plans, rollout strategies, rollback procedures, capacity testing, disaster recovery, and production readiness.
• Maintain architecture documentation, technical decisions, runbooks, and support procedures.
• Drive knowledge transfer and ensure Qiddiya can independently operate and evolve the platform.
• Promote reusable capabilities and common engineering practices across Qiddiya's digital assets.

Vendor Management and Technical Oversight

• Lead and challenge vendor engineering teams, ensuring compliance with Qiddiya Digital standards.
• Review and approve architecture, APIs, data models, integrations, code quality, and major technical decisions.
• Validate vendor deliverables using clear acceptance criteria and measurable technical evidence.
• Lead technical incident management, root-cause analysis, and permanent remediation.
• Identify and manage technical debt, architectural risks, recurring incidents, and operational weaknesses.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
• Extensive software engineering experience (+10 years) in a Lead, Staff, Principal Engineer, Technical Lead, or senior architecture role.

Essential Experience and Skills

• Strong hands-on engineering capability and the ability to challenge implementation-level decisions.
• Experience designing and operating large-scale, distributed, cloud-native, and highly available platforms.
• Experience with customer-facing digital products, including commerce, payments, loyalty, identity, ticketing, or mobile platforms.
• Strong knowledge of APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, distributed systems, data consistency, and failure recovery.
• Strong experience with resilience, observability, performance engineering, security, automated testing, CI/CD, and production operations.
• Experience defining technical KPIs, service-level objectives, non-functional requirements, and acceptance criteria.
• Proven experience overseeing vendors, system integrators, or outsourced engineering teams.
• Strong incident management, root-cause analysis, and problem management experience.
• Strong communication, stakeholder management, and technical decision-making skills.

Work Environment

This is a full-time position based in Riyadh, where the Senior Expert Software Engineer will operate as a senior individual contributor, providing technical leadership without direct line-management responsibilities.