Senior Expert - Software Engineering (Digital Platforms - Catalog)

Position Overview

Qiddiya Digital is actively seeking a seasoned Senior Expert in Software Engineering to take full technical responsibility for pivotal digital product domains within Qiddiya's ecosystem. This role is designed for a highly skilled individual contributor who will exercise strong technical authority without having direct line-management duties.

Key Responsibilities

• Assume full technical ownership of the assigned digital domain from inception through operation.
• Develop and enforce target architecture, engineering standards, and a forward-looking technical roadmap.
• Lead hands-on technical efforts including design, development, integration, release processes, and production operations.
• Provide technical guidance and leadership to vendor engineering teams ensuring adherence to Qiddiya Digital's standards.
• Review and approve key technical aspects such as architecture designs, APIs, data schemas, integrations, codebase quality, and important technical decisions.
• Validate vendor outputs against defined acceptance criteria backed by measurable technical evidence.
• Guarantee that solutions meet requirements for resilience, reliability, scalability, security, observability, maintainability, and cost efficiency.
• Define and track technical key performance indicators (KPIs), including service-level objectives, availability, response latency, recovery time, and overall performance goals.
• Ensure comprehensive automated testing, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting mechanisms are implemented effectively.
• Validate strategies around releases, rollouts, rollbacks, capacity testing, disaster recovery, and readiness for production deployment.
• Lead efforts in technical incident management including root-cause analyses and implementation of permanent fixes.
• Identify and manage technical debt, architectural vulnerabilities, recurrent issues, and operational deficiencies.
• Maintain updated architecture documentation, records of technical decisions, operational runbooks, and support protocols.
• Facilitate knowledge transfer to empower Qiddiya teams to independently manage and develop the platform over time.
• Advocate for reuse of capabilities and consistent engineering practices across Qiddiya’s digital portfolio.

Candidate Requirements

• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field.
• Extensive experience in senior software engineering roles such as Lead Engineer, Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Technical Lead, or Architect.
• Robust hands-on engineering skills with the ability to critically evaluate implementation details.
• Proven background in designing and managing large-scale, distributed, cloud-native, and highly available software platforms.
• Experience with customer-facing digital systems such as commerce, payment solutions, loyalty programs, identity management, ticketing, or mobile platforms.
• Deep understanding of APIs, microservices architecture, event-driven systems, distributed system complexities, data consistency models, and strategies for failure recovery.
• Expertise in resilience engineering, observability tools, performance optimization, security practices, automated testing, CI/CD processes, and production system management.
• Demonstrated ability in managing and overseeing vendor teams, system integrators, or outsourced engineering groups.
• Strong proficiencies in incident handling, root cause analyses, and comprehensive problem resolution.
• Excellent communication skills, stakeholder engagement capabilities, and sound technical decision-making aptitude.