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Principal Digital Engineer

Job Title: Principal Digital Engineer

Department: Digital Office

Reports to: Chief Digital Officer

Role Overview:

We are seeking an experienced Principal Digital Engineer with a deep understanding of overall business needs and strategic objectives of the organisation. The ideal candidate will be a senior technical leader responsible for defining and driving the developer experience vision, internal portals, golden paths, and onboarding automation across Simpaisa Holdings' engineering organisation. Strong expertise in platform engineering principles, developer tooling, and internal product thinking, ensuring alignment with business goals and technology standards in a regulated payments environment, is essential. Expertise in agile methodologies and providing technical leadership across distributed teams is also preferable.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Define the overarching developer experience (DX) vision and strategy, including internal developer portals, golden paths, and self-service tooling for engineering teams across Simpaisa Holdings.
  • Provide deep technical expertise and guidance to engineers across the organisation, acting as a point of escalation for complex tooling, automation, and platform challenges.
  • Design and maintain golden paths - opinionated, well-supported workflows for common engineering tasks such as service creation, CI/CD pipelines, environment provisioning, and deployment to production.
  • Own and evolve the internal developer portal, ensuring engineers have single-pane-of-glass visibility into services, documentation, runbooks, and compliance artefacts.
  • Lead onboarding automation initiatives, ensuring new engineers can be productive within days, with automated environment setup, access provisioning, and guided learning paths.
  • Ensure developer tooling and platforms are designed for security, reliability, and compliance, supporting PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and DFSA/SBP regulatory requirements.
  • Review and approve platform architectures and tooling designs, ensuring adherence to standards and best practices within a payments fintech context.
  • Identify and mitigate significant technical risks and issues across the developer experience portfolio.
  • Research and evaluate emerging technologies (e.g., AI-assisted development, infrastructure-as-code, internal developer platforms) and their potential application within Simpaisa Holdings.
  • Mentor and develop engineering talent within the organisation, fostering a culture of technical excellence, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.
  • Collaborate closely with product managers, business stakeholders, security, compliance, and other technical leaders to define platform roadmaps and priorities.
  • Drive innovation and the adoption of best engineering practices within delivery teams, with a focus on developer velocity, code quality, and operational excellence.

Required Skills and Experience:

  • Agile: Deep understanding and practical application of agile methodologies in the context of platform engineering and large-scale solution delivery.
  • Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to articulate complex architectural and platform concepts to diverse audiences, including executive leadership.
  • Strategy and Planning: Ability to develop and implement strategic DX visions and roadmaps for internal platforms and developer tooling. Strong planning and organisational skills to manage platform initiatives effectively.
  • Leadership & Influence Skills: Exceptional leadership skills to inspire and guide engineering teams, driving technical direction and fostering collaboration across distributed locations.
  • Problem-solving and Analytical Skills: Exceptional problem-solving and analytical skills to address complex platform and tooling challenges and provide strategic technical direction.
  • Platform & DX Expertise: Extensive experience in platform engineering, developer experience, and internal tooling. Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi), containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), Bitbucket Pipelines, and internal developer portals (e.g., Backstage, Port).
  • Payments & Fintech Domain: Understanding of the unique engineering challenges in payments and financial services, including compliance-as-code, audit trails, secure software supply chains, and regulated deployment processes.
  • Stakeholder Management: Ability to build and maintain strong relationships with diverse stakeholders at all levels of the organisation, ensuring alignment on platform vision and strategy.

General Requirements for the Role:

  • Bachelor's Degree in related field: A bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Business Administration, Computer Science, Engineering, or a closely related STEM field is required.
  • 10+ years of experience in software engineering or platform leadership roles: Minimum of 10 years of progressive experience in software engineering with increasing levels of responsibility and leadership, including significant experience in platform engineering or developer experience.
  • Experience building large-scale internal platforms and tooling: Demonstrated experience in architecting and delivering internal developer platforms, golden paths, and automation at scale.
  • Proven track record of successful technical leadership: A verifiable history of providing successful technical leadership and driving positive business outcomes through developer experience and platform engineering.
  • Experience working in regulated industries (payments, fintech, financial services) and familiarity with PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, DFSA, or SBP requirements is highly desirable.

Benefits and Perks:

  • Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package.
  • Opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies and collaborate with skilled professionals across multiple markets.
  • Professional development and training opportunities.
  • Inclusive company culture that values diversity and innovation.
  • Opportunity to define the developer experience for a growing cross-border payments fintech.