Assistant Director of Digital Platforms & Engineering

• Technology Strategy & Roadmap
  
• Define and own the digital platform technology strategy, aligned with SIAD Holding’s growth vision agenda.
  
• Build and maintain the multi-year technical roadmap for OTA, tourism, fleet, AI, and shared services platforms.
  
• Make and govern build / buy / integrate / partner decisions in collaboration with the IT & Digital Transformation Director.
  
• Define and enforce technology standards across backend, frontend, mobile, integration, cloud, security, and data layers.
  
• Identify future platform capabilities required for business scale, AI readiness, and competitive positioning.
  
• Present technology strategy, risks, and investment recommendations to executive leadership.
  
• Product Delivery Leadership
  
• Translate approved business priorities into structured platform delivery plans with clear milestones, owners, and KPIs.
  
• Lead Agile delivery execution across OTA, tourism, fleet, AI, and shared services product lines.
  
• Manage Product Managers, Business Analysts, Engineering Leads, QA, DevOps, Integration, and Support teams.
  
• Enforce sprint discipline, backlog governance, scope control, and weekly delivery reporting.
  
• Drive UAT readiness, release management, and production go-live coordination with business stakeholders.
  
• Eliminate uncontrolled development through formal change governance and dependency management.
  
• Platform Architecture Ownership
  
• Own and govern the overall architecture of all company online platforms.
  
• Design and maintain scalable, secure, and maintainable backend, frontend, mobile, API, cloud, integration, and data architectures.
  
• Establish reusable shared services: identity & access management, notifications, payments, booking engine, pricing engine, supplier connectivity, workflow orchestration, audit logging, and reporting.
  
• Prevent fragmented, duplicated, and undocumented system design through formal architecture review and approval.
  
• Maintain architecture documentation, system diagrams, integration maps, and data flow diagrams as living artifacts.
  
• Ensure all architecture decisions align with enterprise technology governance and NCA ECC / PDPL compliance requirements.
  
• Cybersecurity & Application Security
  
• Own cybersecurity execution for all online platforms, aligned with NCA ECC controls and PDPL obligations.
  
• Embed secure software development practices (SAST, DAST, code review, secrets management) into the engineering lifecycle.
  
• Enforce security controls for authentication, authorization, API access, admin and supplier access, customer data protection, payment flows, audit logging, and production access.
  
• Coordinate vulnerability assessments and penetration testing; ensure critical and high-risk vulnerabilities are remediated within agreed SLAs.
  
• Design platforms with privacy, auditability, and security-by-default as non-negotiable architectural principles.
  
• Integration Strategy & Delivery
  
• Own the integration strategy and architecture across all platforms and third-party systems.
  
• Govern integrations with ERP (Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O), CRM, PMS (Opera Cloud / OHIP), channel managers (Fastbooking), payment gateways, supplier APIs, GPS / telematics providers, communications gateways (WhatsApp / Twilio), BI, and data platforms.
  
• Define API standards, integration patterns, error handling, retry logic, monitoring, and centralized logging.
  
• Prevent uncontrolled point-to-point integrations; enforce a governed integration layer.
  
• Own technical coordination with third-party vendors and system integrators.
  
• Vendor Technical Governance
  
• Manage technical delivery from all software vendors and implementation partners.
  Review vendor architecture, delivery plans, technical quality, and documentation before acceptance.
• Monitor vendor milestones, defects, and SLA performance on a weekly basis.
  
• Enforce source code handover, deployment documentation, and support knowledge transfer at project close.
  
• Identify and escalate vendor dependency risks; recommend mitigation plans to the IT & Digital Transformation Director.
  
• Engineering Management
  
• Build, lead, and grow the remote platform engineering office across backend, frontend, mobile, QA, DevOps, integration, data/BI, application security, and support functions.
  
• Establish and enforce engineering standards: coding practices, branching strategy, code review process, documentation standards, and release discipline.
  
• Manage team capacity, performance, skill development, and succession planning.
  
• Build an engineering culture grounded in ownership, accountability, documentation, and continuous improvement.
  
• DevOps, Cloud & Platform Reliability
  
• Own platform reliability in coordination with DevOps and cloud engineering teams.
  
• Establish and maintain CI/CD pipelines, environment management (dev / QA / staging / UAT / production / DR), and deployment automation.
  
• Implement monitoring, logging, alerting, backup, and incident response processes for all production systems.
  
• Optimize cloud infrastructure cost and performance; ensure scalability readiness for Hajj, Umrah, and seasonal demand peaks.
  
• Drive platform uptime targets and define SLA commitments for each business unit.
  
• Quality Assurance & Release Governance
  
• Own release readiness and quality governance for all digital platforms.
  
• Ensure QA coverage across functional, API, integration, regression, mobile, performance, and security testing.
  
• Mandate release notes, test reports, rollback plans, and deployment checklists before every production release.
  
• Approve release readiness before submission to the IT & Digital Transformation Director for final go-live sign-off.
  
• Track production defects, root causes, and corrective actions; drive test automation maturity over time.
  
• AI, Data & Platform Intelligence
  
• Ensure all platforms are designed for AI readiness — clean data models, structured event streams, and API-accessible data layers.
  
• Support BI dashboards for booking performance, conversion, supplier margin, fleet utilization, system health, and customer behavior analytics.
  
• Identify AI and automation opportunities across OTA, tourism, fleet, and hotel platforms to drive operational efficiency.
  
• Platform Support & Operations
  
• Establish L2/L3 application support capability with defined SLAs, escalation paths, and runbooks.
  
• Define incident management, post-mortem, and continuous improvement processes.
  
• Maintain a knowledge base, support runbooks, and troubleshooting guides that reduce support escalations over time.
  
• Ensure proper handover from development to support teams at each release.
  
  

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or a closely related technical discipline.
  
• Master’s degree, MBA, or executive technology programme is preferred.
  
• Professional certifications in cloud (AWS / Azure / GCP), cybersecurity (CISSP, CEH), project delivery (PMP, SAFe), or enterprise architecture (TOGAF) are advantageous.
  
• 10–15 years Overall technology leadership experience
  
• 7+ years Software engineering leadership
  
• Remote engineering team management
  
• Web and mobile platform delivery
  
• Vendor technical governance
  
• Cloud infrastructure and DevOps
  
• AI/ML product delivery or data platform experience​