Director - Digital Engineering

The Director Digital Engineering will provide technical leadership across Qiddiya s core digital product streams, ensuring that all platforms, services, and digital capabilities are designed and delivered to the highest engineering standards. The role is accountable for ensuring that digital products are built with a reusable, scalable, resilient, reliable, observable, and extensible architecture that can be leveraged across multiple Qiddiya assets. This includes setting the technical direction, challenging low-level engineering decisions, governing solution quality, and ensuring that all delivery outcomes meet the standards defined by Qiddiya Investment Company. The Director Digital Engineering will work in a multi-vendor delivery environment and will play a critical role in ensuring that vendors, engineering teams, and embedded technical leaders are aligned to Qiddiya s technology strategy, architecture principles, and operating model.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership & Engineering Governance

• Lead the technical oversight of Qiddiya s core digital product streams, ensuring that all solutions are designed and delivered in line with Qiddiya s 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 that Qiddiya retains control over critical engineering decisions.

Product Architecture & Reusability

• Ensure that digital products are built as reusable capabilities that can be extended and adopted across multiple Qiddiya assets, rather than being 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 that product delivery aligns with the overall digital target state.

Leadership of Staff Engineers

• Lead and manage Staff Software Engineers who will be 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 that Staff Engineers are actively influencing product delivery, reviewing technical decisions, and protecting Qiddiya s long-term technology interests.

• Build a strong internal engineering capability that reduces dependency on vendors for critical technical decisions and strengthens Qiddiya s ownership of its digital platforms.

• 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.