Associate Director - Digital Infrastructure & DevOps Engineering

The Associate Director, Infrastructure & DevOps Engineering is responsible for leading the execution, implementation, operational stability, resilience, automation, and cost optimization of Digital infrastructure and DevOps foundations across all Qiddiya Digital assets. This role acts as the Digital execution owner for infrastructure services, cloud environments, DevOps enablement, automation, observability foundations, infrastructure reliability, operational readiness, and infrastructure cost management. The role ensures that Digital infrastructure and platform services are implemented, maintained, and operated in alignment with Qiddiya enterprise cloud guidelines, cybersecurity requirements, architecture standards, compliance policies, and governance frameworks. This role does not own Qiddiya’s enterprise cloud strategy, enterprise cloud governance, company-wide cloud standards, application development, or application maintenance. These responsibilities remain with the relevant central Cloud, Enterprise Architecture, Cybersecurity, and application delivery teams. Instead, this role is accountable for translating enterprise cloud and infrastructure guidelines into practical execution across Digital environments, vendors, infrastructure services, DevOps tooling, deployment foundations, production readiness, and platform operations. This is a senior technical leadership role requiring strong infrastructure depth, DevOps execution experience, vendor governance, operational ownership, and the ability to drive Restricted This document has been classified as Restricted by Samy Baili reliable, secure, scalable, automated, and cost-efficient Digital infrastructure across multiple System Integrators and delivery teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Infrastructure & Platform Execution • Lead the implementation and operationalization of Digital infrastructure and platform services across all Digital assets and environments.
• • Translate enterprise cloud guidelines, architecture principles, cybersecurity requirements, and governance expectations into executable Digital infrastructure plans. •
• Ensure Digital workloads are implemented in line with approved QIC technology standards, security policies, compliance requirements, and operational controls. •
• Drive consistency across Digital environments, including development, SIT, UAT, staging, pre-production, production, and hotfix environments. •
• Ensure infrastructure foundations are production-ready, secure, resilient, scalable, observable, and aligned with Digital delivery needs. •
• Work closely with the central Cloud team to ensure alignment with enterprise direction while owning Digital-level execution. •
• Ensure infrastructure decisions are documented, reviewed, controlled, and implemented through the appropriate governance channels. DevOps Engineering & Automation •
• Lead the execution of DevOps engineering practices across Digital infrastructure and platform services. • Drive automation of infrastructure provisioning, environment setup, configuration management, deployment support, and operational tasks. •
• Support the adoption and governance of Infrastructure as Code, automated provisioning, controlled deployments, and auditable environment changes. • Partner with DevSecOps teams to ensure infrastructure services are integrated into CI/CD pipelines, release governance, security gates, and deployment workflows. • Ensure Digital environments support faster, safer, and more predictable delivery without compromising compliance, security, or operational stability.
• Identify and remove infrastructure, environment, and deployment bottlenecks impacting Digital delivery teams.
• Drive standardization of DevOps practices across vendors, System Integrators, and Digital technology teams. Infrastructure Reliability & Resilience
• Own the reliability, resilience, stability, and operational health of Digital infrastructure and platform services. • Ensure high availability, disaster recovery, backup, failover, recovery, and capacity practices are implemented and tested across Digital assets.
• Drive the implementation of resilience requirements for mission-critical Digital journeys from an infrastructure and platform perspective. •
• Reduce infrastructure-related incidents, environment instability, deployment blockers, and operational risks. • Establish operational readiness criteria before go-live, including monitoring, alerting, escalation paths, runbooks, support models, backup readiness, and recovery procedures.
• Ensure Digital infrastructure can support business growth without compromising reliability, performance, availability, security, or cost control.
• Partner with application teams and vendors to support production readiness while keeping application ownership with the relevant delivery teams. Infrastructure Operations & Run Management • Lead the operational management of Digital infrastructure services across all Digital products, environments, and vendors. • Define and enforce operational practices for environment availability, infrastructure maintenance, incident support, release support, and service continuity.
• Ensure clear ownership and accountability across System Integrators, vendors, internal teams, and support functions for infrastructure operations.
• Drive proactive issue identification, root cause analysis, corrective actions, and continuous improvement for infrastructure and platform-related issues.
• Ensure operational documentation, runbooks, support models, escalation paths, handover materials, and recovery procedures are complete and maintained.
• Act as the Digital execution owner for infrastructure operations, ensuring vendors operate under a consistent, controlled, and measurable model.
• Partner with ICC and operations teams to ensure infrastructure-related production issues are visible, actionable, and resolved with the right ownership.
• Cloud Execution Alignment •
• Ensure Digital infrastructure execution is aligned with Qiddiya enterprise cloud strategy, cloud standards, architecture guardrails, and governance requirements.
• Work with the central Cloud team to translate enterprise cloud direction into practical execution across Digital environments and assets.
• Implement approved cloud patterns, landing zone requirements, network designs, security controls, access models, and operational standards within Digital.
• Provide feedback to the central Cloud team on execution challenges, operational risks, cost impacts, and improvement opportunities observed across Digital.
• Ensure Digital cloud workloads are implemented in a secure, compliant, scalable, and cost-efficient way. • Avoid duplication of enterprise cloud governance by keeping the role focused on Digital execution, operationalization, and run management. FinOps & Cost Management
• Own Digital infrastructure cost visibility, optimization, and accountability.
• Establish and drive FinOps practices across Digital infrastructure services, environments, vendors, and products.
• Monitor infrastructure spend and ensure costs are aligned with business value, usage, capacity, and growth expectations.
• Drive cost optimization initiatives across compute, storage, networking, environments, observability tooling, DevOps tooling, and vendor-managed services.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Cybersecurity, or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience with cloud engineering (Azure preferred).
• Understanding of IaC, monitoring and cloud security fundamentals.
• Ability to collaborate with DevSecOps and cyber stakeholders.