Director - Digital Engineering

Role Overview

Director – Digital Engineering at Qiddiya Investment Company. This role provides technical leadership across Qiddiya's core digital product streams, ensuring all platforms, services, and digital capabilities are designed and delivered to the highest engineering standards.

Role Purpose

To establish and enforce technical direction, architecture principles, and engineering governance across Qiddiya's digital products. The Director ensures that all solutions are built with reusable, scalable, resilient, reliable, observable, and extensible architecture that can be leveraged across multiple Qiddiya assets, while managing engineering teams and multi-vendor delivery environments in alignment with the company's technology strategy and operating model.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Engineering Governance

• Lead technical oversight of Qiddiya's core digital product streams, ensuring solutions are designed and delivered in line with target architecture, engineering standards, and long-term technology vision.
• Define and enforce engineering principles around reusability, scalability, resiliency, reliability, observability, maintainability, security, and performance across all digital products and platforms.
• Ensure that all technical decisions are properly reviewed, challenged, and validated by Qiddiya, with clear ownership and governance over architecture and engineering direction.
• Act as a senior technical authority capable of engaging at low-level design, architecture, code, integration, infrastructure, and operational decision-making levels.
• Challenge vendor proposals, solution designs, implementation approaches, and technical trade-offs to ensure Qiddiya retains control over critical engineering decisions.

Product Architecture & Reusability

• Ensure digital products are built as reusable capabilities that can be extended and adopted across multiple Qiddiya assets, rather than designed as isolated one-off implementations.
• Drive the creation of reusable patterns, components, services, APIs, integration approaches, and engineering guidelines that support product scalability across the Qiddiya ecosystem.
• Partner closely with architecture, product, delivery, DevSecOps, cloud, and security teams to ensure product delivery aligns with the overall digital target state.

Leadership of Staff Engineers

• Lead and manage Staff Software Engineers who are embedded within product streams and work closely with vendor teams.
• Set clear expectations for Staff Engineers around technical governance, architecture review, engineering excellence, code quality, observability, resiliency, and vendor challenge.
• Ensure Staff Engineers are actively influencing product delivery, reviewing technical decisions, and protecting Qiddiya's long-term technology interests.
• Build strong internal engineering capability that reduces dependency on vendors for critical technical decisions and strengthens Qiddiya's ownership of its digital platforms.

Qualifications & Experience

• Significant experience in senior engineering leadership roles, ideally within large-scale digital platforms, e-commerce, entertainment, travel, hospitality, fintech, or other high-traffic consumer digital environments.
• Strong hands-on technical background with the ability to challenge detailed engineering, architecture, integration, infrastructure, and implementation decisions.
• Proven experience leading engineering teams in a complex multi-vendor or system integrator delivery model.
• Strong experience governing the delivery of reusable digital platforms, shared services, APIs, and scalable product architectures.
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering practices, DevSecOps, cloud-native architecture, observability, resiliency, reliability engineering, and secure-by-design delivery.
• Experience working with executive stakeholders and translating technical risks, trade-offs, and recommendations into clear business and delivery decisions.