Director - Digital Engineering

Overview

The Director of Digital Engineering is responsible for providing strategic technical leadership across Qiddiya's main digital products. This individual ensures that all digital platforms, services, and capabilities abide by the highest standards in engineering. The role emphasizes creating reusable, scalable, resilient, reliable, observable, and extensible architectures that can be utilized across various Qiddiya assets. The Director oversees technical strategy, challenges engineering choices, governs solution quality, and guarantees that delivery outcomes comply with Qiddiya Investment Company's expectations.

Operating within a multi-vendor environment, the Director ensures alignment of vendors, engineering teams, and embedded technical experts with Qiddiya's technological roadmap, architectural principles, and operational frameworks.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical oversight for Qiddiya’s core digital product lines, ensuring alignment with target architectures, engineering standards, and future technology strategies.
• Establish and enforce engineering principles centered on reusability, scalability, resiliency, reliability, observability, maintainability, security, and performance across all digital platforms.
• Review and validate technical decisions rigorously, ensuring clear ownership and governance over architecture and engineering direction.
• Serve as a senior technical authority engaged in detailed design, architecture, code review, integration, infrastructure, and operational decision-making.
• Critically assess vendor proposals, solution blueprints, implementation strategies, and technical trade-offs to maintain control over key engineering decisions.
• Ensure digital products are developed as reusable assets apt for extension and adoption across multiple Qiddiya properties, avoiding isolated one-off builds.
• Lead efforts to create reusable patterns, components, services, APIs, integration methods, and engineering guidelines promoting scalability within the Qiddiya ecosystem.
• Collaborate with architecture, product, delivery, DevSecOps, cloud, and security teams to maintain alignment with the envisioned digital target state.
• Manage and guide Staff Software Engineers embedded within product streams, working collaboratively with vendor teams.
• Set explicit performance and governance expectations for Staff Engineers concerning architectural oversight, engineering excellence, code quality, observability, resiliency, and vendor engagement.
• Support Staff Engineers to influence product delivery effectively, review technical decisions, and safeguard Qiddiya’s long-term technological priorities.
• Develop robust internal engineering capabilities to decrease dependency on external vendors for critical technical decisions, enhancing Qiddiya's ownership of its digital assets.

Qualifications & Experience

• Extensive experience in senior engineering leadership roles, particularly within large-scale digital platforms or industries such as e-commerce, entertainment, travel, hospitality, fintech, or other high-traffic consumer digital sectors.
• Strong hands-on technical expertise capable of challenging detailed engineering, architecture, integration, infrastructure, and deployment choices.
• Proven track record managing engineering teams in complex multi-vendor or system integrator environments.
• Deep experience supervising delivery of reusable digital platforms, shared services, scalable APIs, and product architectures.
• Comprehensive understanding of modern software engineering methodologies, including DevSecOps, cloud-native designs, observability, resiliency, reliability engineering, and security-by-design principles.
• Ability to engage with executive stakeholders and translate technical risks, compromises, and recommendations into transparent business and delivery decisions.