Hands-On Engineering Lead: Enterprise Systems & AI

Salt; Abu Dhabi; On-site; AED 200,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Salt is seeking a hands-on Engineering Lead / Principal Engineer in Abu Dhabi to drive architecture and delivery of complex enterprise digital products and automation platforms. This role stays technical rather than purely managerial, leading a small team from design through production and owning delivery across architecture, workflows, integrations and AI-assisted features.

You will work closely with product, security and platform teams to ensure reliable, scalable systems in a high-trust

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software-engineering experience.
• 4+ years in a senior technical-lead, staff or principal role.
• Strong backend engineering background.
• Distributed systems, APIs, relational databases and enterprise integration.
• Experience designing workflow-heavy or transaction-heavy systems.
• Cloud-native architecture, containers, Kubernetes and CI/CD.
• Modern authentication and authorization patterns.
• Strong judgment around reliability, security, observability and testing.

Responsibilities

• Define system architecture, service boundaries, API contracts and data models.
• Design workflow and state-management patterns for long-running processes.
• Establish boundaries between deterministic business logic, workflow orchestration and AI-assisted functionality.
• Lead backend and full-stack engineers while remaining hands-on with design, code and code review.
• Build integration patterns with ERP and other enterprise systems.
• Establish engineering standards for testing, observability, security, CI/CD and operational readiness.
• Ensure systems are resilient, auditable and appropriate for a high-trust environment.
• Translate incomplete business requirements into practical technical designs and delivery plans.
• Own technical readiness from initial implementation through production operation.
• Work closely with product, business, security, platform and architecture teams.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

APIs

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Security

Observability

Data modeling

Job description

Salt is seeking a hands-on Engineering Lead / Principal Engineer in Abu Dhabi to drive architecture and delivery of complex enterprise digital products and automation platforms. This role stays technical rather than purely managerial, leading a small team from design through production and owning delivery across architecture, workflows, integrations and AI-assisted features.

You will work closely with product, security and platform teams to ensure reliable, scalable systems in a high-trust