Principal Engineer

Job description / Role

Description

Do you want to love what you do at work? Do you want to make a difference, an impact, transform people's lives? Do you want to work with a team that believes in disrupting the normal, boring, and average?

If yes, then this is the job you're looking for. It is Saudi's #1 event ticketing and experience booking platform in terms of technology, features, agility, and revenue, serving some of the largest mega events in the Kingdom surpassing over 2 billion sales.

Role overview

This is an individual contributor role focused on solving complex technical problems through hands-on engineering, architecture, and technical influence, rather than people management.

Key responsibilities

Technical leadership & architecture

• Drive the system architecture to support large-scale, high-traffic, mission-critical platforms.
• Design and review scalable, secure, fault-tolerant, and high-performance systems.
• Set engineering standards, best practices, and design patterns across teams.
• Lead architectural discussions, technical RFCs, and critical design decisions.
• Identify and proactively address technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and scalability challenges.

Hands-on engineering

• Contribute to complex, high-impact backend features and critical services when needed.
• Guide teams on designing persistence, caching, and data access strategies using SQL and NoSQL.
• Ensure APIs follow best-in-class RESTful JSON design principles.
• Review code to ensure quality, security, maintainability, and performance.

Product & business collaboration

• Partner closely with Product, Operations, and Leadership to translate business goals into technical solutions.
• Provide technical input and execution guidance on the product roadmap.
• Balance speed of delivery with long-term system sustainability and maintainability.

Operational excellence

• Ensure systems are observable, reliable, and production-ready.
• Lead performance monitoring, incident response, and post-mortems for critical systems.
• Promote best practices in documentation, diagrams, and architectural flowcharts.
• Act as a point of escalation for complex operational or technical challenges.
• Leverage AI to uncover opportunities that improve product experiences, streamline operations, and enhance team productivity.

Key skills

• Deep expertise in PHP/Laravel, including design patterns, architectural components, frameworks, and best practices for building scalable, maintainable, and high-performance backend systems.
• Experience with designing persistence and caching models across SQL and NoSQL databases, optimized for high concurrency, low latency, and system resilience.
• Strong, hands-on experience with MongoDB at scale.
• Advanced understanding of RESTful JSON API design, integration with frontend/mobile clients, and backend security principles.
• Solid experience in documenting software solutions using diagrams and flowcharts.
• Ability to see the big picture while maintaining attention to detail.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills (fluent English speaking and writing).
• Experience in Scrum and Agile methodology.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), CI/CD pipelines, and containerized deployments is a plus.

Requirements

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience building backend systems using Laravel/PHP.
• Proven experience delivering high-traffic, mission-critical platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to own architecture and drive technical direction across multiple teams.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience contributing to open-source projects or technical thought leadership is a plus.