Senior Expert Software Engineer - Digital Platforms

About the Role

Qiddiya Digital is looking for a highly skilled and hands-on Senior Expert Software Engineer specializing in Digital Platforms to take complete technical ownership of critical digital product areas within Qiddiya's ecosystem. This position is an advanced individual contributor role that holds significant technical authority. Although it does not involve direct line-management, it requires providing technical leadership to vendor engineering teams and ensuring the quality, reliability, security, performance, and operational readiness of the assigned digital platform.

A crucial goal of this role is to eliminate reliance on outside delivery as a "black box," to retain essential knowledge within Qiddiya, and to ensure full internal control over digital platforms.

Responsibilities

• Assume end-to-end technical responsibility for the assigned digital domain.
• Establish and uphold target architecture, engineering standards, and strategic technical roadmaps.
• Deliver hands-on leadership across design, implementation, integration, software release, and production operations.
• Guide and critically assess vendor engineering teams to guarantee adherence to Qiddiya Digital's standards.
• Review and authorize architectural designs, APIs, data models, integrations, code quality, and technical decisions.
• Validate vendor outputs using defined acceptance criteria and measurable technical metrics.
• Ensure platforms are resilient, reliable, scalable, secure, observable, maintainable, and cost-effective.
• Define and track technical KPIs, service level objectives related to availability, latency, recovery, and performance.
• Implement and oversee automated testing, continuous integration/delivery pipelines, monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting systems.
• Assess and approve release plans including rollout, rollback strategies, capacity testing, disaster recovery, and production readiness.
• Lead management of technical incidents, root cause investigations, and enact permanent fixes.
• Identify and address technical debt, architectural risks, recurrent incidents, and weaknesses in operations.
• Maintain comprehensive architecture documentation, technical decisions records, runbooks, and support procedures.
• Facilitate knowledge transfer ensuring Qiddiya’s capability to independently operate and develop the platform.
• Promote reuse of capabilities and harmonized engineering practices across Qiddiya’s digital assets.

Requirements

• Possess a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Extensive experience in senior software engineering roles such as Lead, Staff, Principal Engineer, Technical Lead, or senior architect.
• Strong practical engineering skills with capability to critically evaluate implementation details.
• Experience designing and managing large-scale distributed, cloud-native, and highly available systems.
• Background in customer-facing digital products including commerce, payments, loyalty programs, identity management, ticketing, and mobile platforms.
• Deep understanding of APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, distributed systems, data consistency models, and failure recovery strategies.
• Proficiency in resilience engineering, observability, performance optimization, security, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and production support operations.
• Proven experience managing vendors, system integrators, or outsourced software engineering teams.
• Strong skills in incident handling, root cause analysis, and problem resolution.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and decisive technical judgment.