staff software engineer

Your mission is to make DigitalZones architecture hold together as the business multiplies. DZ has grown into several product verticals. With that growth comes drift: forked services, duplicated capabilities, and per-team divergence that quietly raises the cost of every future change. You will architect and deliver solutions that span multiple teams, drive convergence of shared services, and set the technical bar that other engineers work to. This is a multiplier role: your impact is measured by what several teams ship well, not by what you ship alone.

What youll do

• Architect systems spanning multiple teams, anticipating future use cases and designing to minimise the cost of change rather than optimising for the current sprint.
• Drive convergence of shared services across business units, actively resisting fork-and-diverge, and reducing the drift .
• Set code quality, testing and review standards for your teams, including the conventions that make AI-assisted development safe at speed. Review for maintainability and system fit, not just correctness.
• Lead the difficult investigations: diagnose issues spanning your domain and adjacent ones, and mentor others on systematic debugging rather than solving it for them.
• Own observability for your domain and build a culture of it across teams, using both operational and business metrics to drive stability and performance work.
• Lead secure design reviews and partner with the security function to apply DZs security strategy across your teams including how secrets and PII (passport and telecom identifiers) are handled to policy.
• Partner with fraud and risk stakeholders to build controls into your domain, balancing fraud loss and chargeback exposure against customer friction on a payment surface that carries real abuse exposure in different market.
• Ensure epics and cross-team dependencies are broken down, understood and resolvable without teams waiting on each other, and drive short cycle time.
• Mentor within and beyond your team, facilitate cross-team decisions with genuine buy-in, and decide engineering work for your teams based on strategy, contributing to org-level engineering strategy as it takes shape.

What youll bring

• 8+ years building and operating production software, with a track record of owning architecture that spans several teams and outliving the org chart it was designed under.
• Deep experience in at least one of DZs stacks (TypeScript, Go, C#) with the range to reason credibly across all of them, plus solid Postgres and AWS depth.
• Evidence of consolidating forked or duplicated services, or of setting standards that other teams adopted because they were good, not because they were mandated.
• A security and fraud lens applied by default: OWASP fluency, secure design instincts, and an understanding of what abuse looks like on a payments and digital-fulfilment surface.
• Influence without authority: the ability to build relationships across teams, foster healthy disagreement, and guide a group of strong engineers to a decision theyll actually stand behind.
• Judgement about cost and value, including where AI leverage genuinely saves time and where it introduces risk that someone will pay for later.

• Immediate, large-scale impact on a high-growth business
• Top-of-the-market compensation packages
• Work alongside top regional talent, with team members from Talabat, Careem, Etisalat, and more