Senior Expert Software Engineering (Digital Platforms Catalog)📣 Job Ad

About Qiddiya and the Role

Qiddiya is seeking a highly experienced and hands-on Senior Expert Software Engineering (Digital Platforms Catalog) to join its team in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This is a full-time, senior individual contributor role focused on taking technical ownership of critical digital product domains within Qiddiya's extensive ecosystem, specifically concentrating on the Digital Platforms Catalog.

Role Purpose and Technical Leadership

The primary objective of this role is to ensure Qiddiya maintains full control over its digital platforms by eliminating black-box delivery and retaining critical knowledge internally. While there are no direct line-management responsibilities, the Senior Expert will provide significant technical leadership to vendor engineering teams. This position holds strong technical authority and is accountable for the quality, resilience, reliability, security, performance, and operational readiness of the assigned digital platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Assume end-to-end technical ownership of the designated 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.
• 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 implemented.
• Validate release plans, rollout strategies, rollback procedures, capacity testing, disaster recovery, and production readiness.
• Lead technical incident management, root-cause analysis, and permanent remediation efforts.
• 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 ensure Qiddiya can independently operate and evolve the platform.
• Promote reusable capabilities and common engineering practices across Qiddiya's digital assets.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Over 10 years of extensive software engineering experience in a Lead, Staff, Principal Engineer, Technical Lead, or senior architecture role.
• Strong hands-on engineering capability with 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.

Technical Skills and Expertise

• Strong knowledge of APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, distributed systems, data consistency, and failure recovery.
• Extensive experience with resilience, observability, performance engineering, security, automated testing, CI/CD, and production operations.
• Strong incident management, root-cause analysis, and problem management experience.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and technical decision-making skills.

Work Location

This full-time position is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.