Senior Expert Software Engineer

About the Role

Qiddiya Digital is seeking a highly experienced Senior Expert Software Engineer to assume technical ownership of critical digital product domains within Qiddiya's ecosystem. This full-time position is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and focuses on ensuring the quality, resilience, and operational readiness of assigned digital platforms.

Role Overview and Strategic Impact

This is a senior individual contributor role that carries significant technical authority. While it does not involve direct line-management, the Senior Expert Software Engineer will provide technical leadership to vendor engineering teams. A primary objective is to eliminate black-box delivery, ensure critical knowledge remains within Qiddiya, and maintain full control over its digital platforms. The role is accountable for the quality, resilience, reliability, security, performance, and operational readiness of the assigned platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Take end-to-end technical ownership of the assigned digital domain.
• Define and maintain target architecture, engineering standards, and the technical roadmap.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership across design, implementation, integration, release, and production operations.
• Lead and challenge vendor engineering teams to ensure 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.
• 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.
• Lead technical incident management, root-cause analysis, and permanent remediation.
• Identify and manage technical debt, architectural risks, recurring incidents, and operational weaknesses.
• Maintain architecture documentation, technical decisions, runbooks, and support procedures.
• Drive knowledge transfer to enable Qiddiya to independently operate and evolve the platform.
• Promote reusable capabilities and common engineering practices across Qiddiya's digital assets.

Required Experience and Leadership

• Extensive software-engineering experience in a Lead, Staff, Principal Engineer, Technical Lead, or senior architecture role.
• Strong hands-on engineering capability, including the ability to challenge implementation-level decisions.
• Proven 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, mobile, or similar platforms.
• Demonstrated experience overseeing vendors, system integrators, or outsourced engineering teams.
• Strong experience in incident management, root-cause analysis, and problem management.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder-management, and technical decision-making skills.

Technical Expertise

• Strong knowledge of APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, distributed systems, data consistency, and failure recovery mechanisms.
• Extensive experience with resilience, observability, performance engineering, security, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and production operations.

Application Process

Candidates meeting the above qualifications are encouraged to apply for this full-time position with Qiddiya | القدية in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.