Head of Infrastructure and Data Platform

About the role

Soar is a SAMA-regulated Saudi home-finance platform looking for a hands-on leader to own its infrastructure, DevOps operations and data platform. The role reports to the CTO and leads the DevOps and data engineering teams across Cairo and Riyadh, with responsibility for reliability, secure and fast production delivery and a Snowflake-based data stack.

Key responsibilities

• Infrastructure: own the cloud architecture (GCP, KSA-resident production), networking, zero-trust access and cost management; set and meet SLOs for uptime, latency and recovery, and run incident response, on-call and blameless post-mortems
• Compliance: keep infrastructure compliant with SAMA CSF, data-residency and audit requirements, working with Security and GRC
• DevOps: own CI/CD and deployment pipelines end to end, including build, test gates, release, rollback and environment parity across dev, UAT and prod
• Standardise infrastructure as code, Kubernetes and Cloud Run practices, secrets management and change control
• Build observability into everything: logging, metrics, tracing and alerting
• Data platform: own the Snowflake warehouse and data infrastructure (ingestion, pipelines, modelling, orchestration, access controls); deliver 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
• Hire, grow and lead the DevOps and data engineers, set the roadmap, standards and budgets, and partner with Product Engineering, QA, Security and the business on go-live readiness

Required profile

• 10+ years in infrastructure, SRE or DevOps, including 3+ years leading teams
• Proven ownership of production reliability for a high-availability, customer-facing platform
• Experience in a regulated environment such as fintech, banking or payments, with security and compliance controls
• Clear communicator who can turn technical risk into business decisions

Required skills

• Deep hands-on experience with a major cloud (GCP preferred), Kubernetes, Terraform and modern CI/CD
• Strong experience with Snowflake or a comparable cloud warehouse and data pipeline tooling
• Nice to have: SAMA, PDPL, ISO 27001 or PCI DSS, KSA data-residency setups, dbt, Airflow or Dagster, Kafka or Pub/Sub, zero-trust networking (e.g. Twingate), WAF/Cloud Armor and SOC integration, exposure to mortgage, lending or core banking systems, Arabic