Head of Infrastructure & Data Platform

Role overview

Infrastructure

• Own cloud architecture, networking, zero-trust access, and cost management; production is hosted in KSA.
• Set and meet uptime, latency, and recovery SLOs; lead incident response, on-call, and blameless post-mortems.
• Maintain SAMA CSF, data-residency, and audit compliance with Security and GRC.

DevOps

• Own end-to-end CI/CD and deployment pipelines, from build and test gates through release and rollback, with environment parity across development, UAT, and production.
• Standardize infrastructure as code, Kubernetes, Cloud Run, secrets management, and change control.
• Build observability with logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting to reduce noise and detect real problems early.

Data platform

• Own the Snowflake warehouse and wider data infrastructure, including ingestion, pipelines, modeling, orchestration, and access controls.
• Deliver reliable, governed data for finance, risk, regulatory reporting, and analytics, with clear data quality and lineage.
• Manage data security, PII handling, retention, and residency in line with SAMA and PDPL.

Leadership

• Hire, develop, and lead DevOps and data engineers; set the roadmap, standards, and budgets.
• Partner with Product Engineering, QA, Security, and the business on priorities and go-live readiness.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years in infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps, including 3+ years leading teams.
• Deep hands-on experience with a major cloud; GCP is preferred; Kubernetes, Terraform, and modern CI/CD experience.
• Proven production-reliability ownership for a high-availability, customer-facing platform.
• Strong experience with Snowflake or a comparable cloud warehouse and data pipeline tooling.
• Regulated-environment experience, such as fintech, banking, or payments, with security and compliance controls.
• Clear communicator able to translate technical risk into business decisions.

Nice to have

• SAMA, PDPL, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, or KSA data-residency experience.
• dbt, Airflow or Dagster, Kafka or Pub/Sub, and Snowflake cost optimization.
• Zero-trust networking such as Twingate, WAF/Cloud Armor, or SOC integration.
• Exposure to mortgage, lending, or core banking systems; Arabic language skills.