Lead Engineer Application Architecture & Scalability (5 to 8 years Reports To: Head of Engineering)

Our client is the Middle East's leading on-demand grocery delivery platform — connecting millions of customers with supermarkets, dark stores, and specialty retailers across the UAE and beyond. Our backend powers a complex, real-time operation: inventory availability, order lifecycle, logistics coordination, and third-party integrations that have to work in concert, at scale, every day.

About the role
We are looking for a hands-on engineering lead who owns the architecture and scalability of our applications from the development side. You will make sure everything the teams build is designed and written to scale, performs well and follows a consistent standard.

This is a development role, not an infrastructure one. We already have a DevOps team handling the cluster, networking and cloud. Your home is with the developers, owning how services are architected, how the code holds up under load, and how applications are packaged and released. You will also lead our AI-led SDLC push, building internal tools and agents that help us manage and monitor the applications in a smarter way.
You will lead a small team while staying deeply hands-on yourself.

What you will do

• Own application scalability end to end. Find the bottlenecks, heavy queries and weak design points, and lead the fixes.
• Guide how services are architected so they scale cleanly as load grows.
• Set the engineering standards every app follows, and build CI guardrails that block bad practices from going live.
• Own the Helm charts that define how services are configured and released, and keep the model easy for the team to understand.
• Set up application-level observability (tracing, profiling, metrics) and keep a close eye on where apps break under scale.
• Lead our AI-led SDLC initiative and build internal tools and agents for triage, diagnostics, code review and operational reporting.
• Bring in the right developer tooling and mentor a small team on architecture and engineering quality.
  
  
  

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You should have

• 5 to 8 years of strong software engineering, with a clear architecture and scalability track record.
• Deep, hands-on experience with a modern web framework (Ruby on Rails, Node.js or Django) and how such apps behave and scale in production.
• Good grip on relational databases (PostgreSQL or MySQL) and caching (Redis or Memcached) from the application side.
• Experience with messaging and streaming systems (Apache Kafka, Azure Service Bus or RabbitMQ).
• Working knowledge of a frontend framework (Angular, React or Vue) from a build and release point of view.
• Hands-on experience with containers, Kubernetes and writing Helm charts.
• Experience defining standards and building CI/CD quality gates.
• A real interest in applying AI to engineering work, ideally with some hands-on tooling or agent building.
  
  
  

Good to have

• Experience scaling consumer-facing or e-commerce applications with real traffic.
• Familiarity with Azure and a sense of how apps sit on top of the infrastructure.
• Some exposure to Terraform or Bicep, enough to work well with a DevOps team.
• Experience with AI agent frameworks or SDLC automation.
  
  

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You will enjoy this role if
You like owning how things are built rather than building features all day, you care about clean architecture and real scale, and you are keen to lead the AI side of how a strong engineering team works.


Why Us

• You will work with a great team
• Lot of learning opportunities and experience of lifetime
• You will part of great culture
• Congenial Atmosphere
• Excellent and Market competitive Gross salary (Depends upon experience, skillset and interview). The salary is taxable (500k to 600k)
• Medical Insurance
• Gratuity
• Annual Leave
• Annual Bonus
• Causal Leave
• Sick Leave
• Birthday Leave
• Weekly Team Lunch
• .Monthly Team Building Activities
• Paid Training