Senior Expert - Software Engineering (Digital Platforms - Catalog)

Role Overview

Senior Expert - Software Engineering (Digital Platforms - Catalog) at Qiddiya Investment Company. This is a senior individual contributor role with technical authority and no direct line-management responsibility. The position provides technical leadership to vendor engineering teams and maintains accountability for the quality, resilience, reliability, security, performance, and operational readiness of the assigned platform.

Role Purpose

Take end-to-end technical ownership of critical digital product domains across Qiddiya's ecosystem. Eliminate black-box delivery, retain critical knowledge within Qiddiya, and ensure Qiddiya remains in full control of its digital platforms.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Standards

• Define and maintain the target architecture, engineering standards, and technical roadmap.
• Review and approve architecture, APIs, data models, integrations, and major technical decisions.
• Maintain architecture documentation, technical decisions, runbooks, and support procedures.
• Promote reusable capabilities and common engineering practices across Qiddiya's digital assets.

Design & Implementation

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across design, implementation, integration, release, and production operations.
• Ensure solutions are resilient, reliable, scalable, secure, observable, maintainable, and cost efficient.
• Drive knowledge transfer and ensure Qiddiya can independently operate and evolve the platform.

Vendor & Team Leadership

• Lead and challenge vendor engineering teams, ensuring compliance with Qiddiya Digital standards.
• Validate vendor deliverables using clear acceptance criteria and measurable technical evidence.

Quality & Testing

• 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.

Operational Excellence

• Define and monitor technical KPIs, service-level objectives, availability, latency, recovery, and performance targets.
• Lead technical incident management, root-cause analysis, and permanent remediation.
• Identify and manage technical debt, architectural risks, recurring incidents, and operational weaknesses.

Qualifications & Experience

• 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.
• 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.
• Proven experience overseeing vendors, system integrators, or outsourced engineering teams.
• Strong incident-management, root-cause-analysis, and problem-management experience.

Skills & Competencies

• Strong hands-on engineering capability and the ability to challenge implementation-level decisions.
• 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.
• Strong communication, stakeholder-management, and technical decision-making skills.