Head of Infrastructure & Data Platform

About The Role Role summary: Soar is a SAMA-regulated Saudi home-finance platform. We're looking for a hands-on leader to own all of our infrastructure, DevOps operations and data platform. You'll be accountable for reliability, secure and fast delivery to production, and a Snowflake-based data stack the business can trust. You'll report to the CTO and lead the DevOps and data engineering teams across Cairo and Riyadh. Key responsibilities: Infrastructure: - Own the cloud architecture (GCP, KSA-resident production), networking, zero-trust access and cost management. - Set and meet the SLOs for uptime, latency and recovery, and run incident response, on-call and blameless post-mortems. - Keep infrastructure compliant with SAMA CSF, data-residency and audit requirements, working with Security and GRC. DevOps: - Own the CI/CD and deployment pipelines end to end: 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 that cut noise and catch real problems early. Data platform: - Own the Snowflake warehouse and the wider data infrastructure: ingestion, pipelines, modelling, 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, grow and lead the DevOps and data engineers, and set the roadmap, standards and budgets. - Partner with Product Engineering, QA, Security and the business on priorities and on readiness for each go-live. Requirements Required qualifications : - 10+ years in infrastructure, SRE or DevOps, including 3+ years leading teams. - Deep hands-on experience with a major cloud (GCP preferred), Kubernetes, Terraform and modern CI/CD. - Proven ownership of production reliability for a high-availability, customer-facing platform. - Strong experience running Snowflake or a comparable cloud warehouse, plus data pipeline tooling. - 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. Nice to have : - SAMA, PDPL, ISO 27001 or PCI DSS experience, and KSA data-residency setups. - dbt, Airflow or Dagster, streaming such as Kafka or Pub/Sub, and Snowflake cost optimisation. - Experience with zero-trust networking (e.g. Twingate), WAF/Cloud Armor and SOC integration. - Exposure to mortgage, lending or core banking systems. - Arabic language skills.