Director - Digital Engineering

About the Role

The Director of Digital Engineering will provide strategic technical leadership over Qiddiya's primary digital product portfolios. This leadership encompasses guaranteeing that platforms, services, and digital capabilities are engineered according to the highest established standards. The role mandates creating scalable, reusable, resilient, reliable, observable, and extensible digital architectures that can be leveraged across multiple Qiddiya assets.

The director will set the technological vision, rigorously evaluate engineering decisions, enforce governance of solution quality, and ensure deliveries comply with the standards specified by Qiddiya Investment Company. Operating within a multi-vendor ecosystem, this position requires aligning engineering teams, embedded technical leaders, and vendors with Qiddiya's technology roadmap, architectural standards, and operational model.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide leadership for technical aspects of Qiddiya's core digital products, ensuring adherence to target architectures and engineering benchmarks.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards covering reusability, scalability, reliability, observability, maintainability, security, and performance across digital offerings.
• Oversee and challenge technical decisions with clear governance for architectural and engineering direction.
• Serve as a senior technical authority engaging deeply on design, architecture, code, integration, infrastructure, and operations.
• Critically evaluate vendor proposals, design solutions, and implementation strategies to safeguard Qiddiya's control over pivotal engineering choices.
• Promote the construction of reusable components, services, APIs, integration strategies, and guidelines to support scalability across the Qiddiya ecosystem.
• Collaborate closely with architecture, product management, delivery teams, DevSecOps, cloud, and security groups to ensure alignment with the overall digital future state.
• Lead and manage Staff Software Engineers embedded in product streams, liaising closely with vendors.
• Set technical expectations for Staff Engineers emphasizing governance, architecture review, engineering excellence, code quality, and vendor oversight.
• Ensure staff engineers actively influence product deliveries and safeguard Qiddiya's technology longevity.
• Build strong in-house engineering capabilities to reduce reliance on external vendors for critical decisions and enhance ownership of Qiddiya’s digital platforms.

Candidate Requirements

• Extensive experience at senior engineering leadership levels within sectors such as large-scale digital platforms, e-commerce, entertainment, travel, hospitality, fintech, or other high-traffic consumer domains.
• Strong practical technical expertise capable of assessing detailed engineering, architecture, integration, infrastructure, and implementation decisions.
• Proven leadership managing engineering teams in complex multi-vendor or system integrator environments.
• Deep experience governing delivery of reusable digital platforms, shared services, APIs, and scalable architectures.
• Solid understanding of contemporary software engineering best practices including DevSecOps, cloud-native architectures, observability, resiliency, reliability engineering, and security-by-design methodologies.
• Experience collaborating with executive stakeholders to translate technical risks, trade-offs, and recommendations into clear business and delivery decisions.