Head of Applications

About the Role

Starlinks is seeking a Head of Applications to lead the strategy, design, delivery, and continuous improvement of the company’s enterprise application landscape. This full-time role focuses on enabling efficient, scalable, and digitally differentiated logistics, warehousing, distribution, and last-mile operations across Saudi Arabia and the GCC. The Head of Applications will own the application roadmap, manage engineering and delivery teams, and oversee vendor partnerships to ensure secure, highly available, and business-aligned solutions that deliver measurable operational and commercial value.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and manage the multi-year application and digital roadmap, aligning it with Starlinks’ business strategy and growth plans across KSA and the GCC.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of application programs, ensuring timely, within-budget, and quality-compliant execution from requirements to adoption.
• Oversee the implementation of new customer operations, onboarding, and system integrations, including WMS, TMS, ERP, and customer-specific solutions.
• Ensure high availability, performance, and stability of business-critical applications supporting 24/7 warehouse, fulfillment, and last-mile operations.
• Set standards for solution architecture, APIs, and integration with external platforms such as customers, carriers, marketplaces, and government systems.
• Identify and deliver innovation opportunities, including AI-powered solutions, warehouse automation integration, IoT, and process automation.
• Manage software vendors, system integrators, and technology partners, covering selection, contract negotiation, performance, and SLA governance.
• Own the applications budget (CAPEX and OPEX), including forecasting, cost optimization, and business-case development for new investments.
• Ensure applications comply with information security policies, data protection requirements, and applicable Saudi regulations.
• Lead, coach, and develop a multi-disciplinary team of application managers, solution architects, developers, business analysts, and QA professionals.

Application Strategy and Delivery

This role involves maintaining the enterprise application architecture and portfolio, rationalizing duplicate or legacy systems, and prioritizing investments based on business value, risk, and cost. It requires translating business needs from various departments into clear product and delivery priorities. The Head of Applications will establish delivery methodologies such as Agile/DevOps and track key delivery metrics.

Operational Reliability and Innovation

The Head of Applications is responsible for defining and monitoring SLAs, incident, problem, and change management processes. This includes driving root-cause analysis and preventive actions to minimize downtime and operational disruption. The role also involves evaluating emerging technologies, running proofs of concept, and scaling solutions that demonstrate clear operational and commercial benefits, collaborating with automation and material-handling partners.

Governance and Team Leadership

The position ensures data quality, master data governance, and reliable data flows to support analytics and decision-making. It requires embedding secure-by-design practices, access control, backup, and disaster recovery in all application solutions. Furthermore, the Head of Applications will build strong relationships with business leaders and executive stakeholders, providing regular updates on roadmap progress, risks, and value delivered, while managing resourcing, capability building, and succession planning.

Required Experience

• Over 10 years of experience in application leadership and management.