Senior Expert - Software Engineering (Digital Platforms - Catalog)

Qiddiya | القدية; Riyadh; On-site; SAR 350,000 - 700,000; Full time

Job summary

Qiddiya Digital seeks a highly experienced Senior Expert - Software Engineering to own technical strategy across digital platforms, with strong authority and hands-on leadership. The role requires driving architecture, standards, and platform reliability while maintaining full control of platform quality across vendor teams.

The successful candidate will define roadmaps, validate architectures, and oversee CI/CD, testing, monitoring, and production readiness to ensure scalable, secure digital

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
• Extensive software-engineering experience in Lead/Senior architecture roles with hands-on capability.
• Experience designing and operating large-scale, distributed, cloud-native platforms.
• Experience with customer-facing digital products, commerce, loyalty, identity, or similar platforms.
• Strong knowledge of APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, data consistency, and failure recovery.
• Experience in resilience, observability, performance engineering, security, automated testing, CI/CD, and production operations.
• Proven experience overseeing vendors, system integrators, or outsourced teams.
• Strong incident-management, root-cause-analysis, and problem-management experience.

Responsibilities

• Take end-to-end technical ownership of the assigned digital domain.
• Define and maintain 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, ensuring adherence to 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, and cost efficient.

Skills

Lead engineer

Cloud-native architectures

APIs & microservices

Vendors management

Incident management

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/SE/IT

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Qiddiya Digital is seeking highly experienced and hands‑on Senior Expert - Software Engineering (Digital Platforms - Catalog) to take technical ownership of critical digital product domains across Qiddiya's ecosystem.

This is a senior individual contributor role with strong technical authority.

While the position has no direct line‑management responsibility, it will provide technical leadership to vendor engineering teams and remain accountable for the quality, resilience, reliability, security, performance, and operational readiness of the assigned platform.

A key objective is to eliminate black‑box delivery, retain critical knowledge within Qiddiya, and ensure Qiddiya remains in full control of its digital platforms.

• Take end‑to‑end technical ownership of the assigned 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, ensuring 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 and ensure Qiddiya can independently operate and evolve the platform.
• Promote reusable capabilities and common engineering practices across Qiddiya's digital assets

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
• Extensive software‑engineering experience in a Lead, Staff, Principal Engineer, Technical Lead, or senior architecture role.
• Strong hands‑on engineering capability and the ability to challenge implementation‑level decisions.
• Experience designing and operating large‑scale, distributed, cloud‑native, and highly available platforms.
• Experience with customer‑facing digital products, commerce, payments, loyalty, identity, ticketing, mobile, or similar platforms.
• Strong knowledge of APIs, microservices, event‑driven architecture, distributed systems, data consistency, and failure recovery.
• Strong experience with resilience, observability, performance engineering, security, automated testing, CI/CD, and production operations.
• Proven experience overseeing vendors, system integrators, or outsourced engineering teams.
• Strong incident‑management, root‑cause‑analysis, and problem‑management experience.
• Strong communication, stakeholder‑management, and technical decision‑making skills.