Head of Infrastructure & Data Platform

Soar; Dubai; On-site; AED 600,000 - 900,000; Full time

Job summary

Soar, a SAMA-regulated Saudi home-finance platform, is seeking a hands-on leader to own all infrastructure, DevOps operations and a Snowflake-based data stack. You will be accountable for reliability, secure and fast delivery to production, and will report to the CTO while leading teams across Cairo and Riyadh.

You will drive cloud architecture (GCP), Kubernetes, IaC, security, and data governance, ensuring compliance with SAMA and PDPL.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in infrastructure, SRE or DevOps, including 3+ years leading teams.
• Deep hands-on experience with a major cloud (GCP preferred), Kubernetes, Terraform and modern CI/CD.
• Proven ownership of production reliability for a high-availability, customer-facing platform.
• Strong experience running Snowflake or a comparable cloud warehouse, plus data pipeline tooling.
• Experience in a regulated environment such as fintech, banking or payments, with security and compliance controls.
• Clear communicator who can turn technical risk into business decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own the cloud architecture, networking, zero-trust access and cost management.
• Set and meet the SLOs for uptime, latency, and recovery; run incident response and blameless post-mortems.
• Keep infrastructure compliant with SAMA CSF, data-residency and audit requirements.
• Own the CI/CD and deployment pipelines end to end: build, test gates, release, rollback and environment parity across dev, UAT and prod.
• Standardise infrastructure as code, Kubernetes and Cloud Run practices, secrets management and change control.
• Build observability into everything: logging, metrics, tracing and alerting that cut noise and catch real problems early.
• Own the Snowflake warehouse and the wider data infrastructure: ingestion, pipelines, modelling, orchestration and access controls.
• Deliver reliable, governed data for finance, risk, regulatory reporting and analytics, with clear data quality and lineage.
• Manage data security, PII handling, retention and residency in line with SAMA and PDPL.
• Hire, grow and lead the DevOps and data engineers, and set the roadmap, standards and budgets.
• Partner with Product Engineering, QA, Security and the business on priorities and readiness for each go-live.

Skills

GCP

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD

Cloud Run

SRE

Data platform

Tools

Snowflake

Job description

About The Role

Role summary:

Soar is a SAMA-regulated Saudi home-finance platform. We're looking for a hands-on leader to own all of our infrastructure, DevOps operations and data platform. You'll be accountable for reliability, secure and fast delivery to production, and a Snowflake-based data stack the business can trust. You'll report to the CTO and lead the DevOps and data engineering teams across Cairo and Riyadh.

Key responsibilities:

Infrastructure:

• Own the cloud architecture (GCP, KSA-resident production), networking, zero-trust access and cost management.
• Set and meet the SLOs for uptime, latency and recovery, and run incident response, on-call and blameless post-mortems.
• Keep infrastructure compliant with SAMA CSF, data-residency and audit requirements, working with Security and GRC.

DevOps:

• Own the CI/CD and deployment pipelines end to end: build, test gates, release, rollback and environment parity across dev, UAT and prod.
• Standardise infrastructure as code, Kubernetes and Cloud Run practices, secrets management and change control.
• Build observability into everything: logging, metrics, tracing and alerting that cut noise and catch real problems early.

Data platform:

• Own the Snowflake warehouse and the wider data infrastructure: ingestion, pipelines, modelling, orchestration and access controls.
• Deliver reliable, governed data for finance, risk, regulatory reporting and analytics, with clear data quality and lineage.
• Manage data security, PII handling, retention and residency in line with SAMA and PDPL.

Leadership:

• Hire, grow and lead the DevOps and data engineers, and set the roadmap, standards and budgets.
• Partner with Product Engineering, QA, Security and the business on priorities and on readiness for each go-live.

Requirements

Required qualifications :

• 10+ years in infrastructure, SRE or DevOps, including 3+ years leading teams.
• Deep hands-on experience with a major cloud (GCP preferred), Kubernetes, Terraform and modern CI/CD.
• Proven ownership of production reliability for a high-availability, customer-facing platform.
• Strong experience running Snowflake or a comparable cloud warehouse, plus data pipeline tooling.
• Experience in a regulated environment such as fintech, banking or payments, with security and compliance controls.
• Clear communicator who can turn technical risk into business decisions.

Nice to have :

• SAMA, PDPL, ISO 27001 or PCI DSS experience, and KSA data-residency setups.
• dbt, Airflow or Dagster, streaming such as Kafka or Pub/Sub, and Snowflake cost optimisation.
• Experience with zero-trust networking (e.g. Twingate), WAF/Cloud Armor and SOC integration.
• Exposure to mortgage, lending or core banking systems.
• Arabic language skills.