Senior Expert - Software Engineering

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.