Engineering Lead / Principal Engineer

Engineering Lead / Principal Engineer — Enterprise Platforms & Automation Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE Employment: Full-time 12 month contract to perm The Role We are seeking a hands-on Engineering Lead / Principal Engineer to lead the architecture and delivery of complex enterprise digital products and automation platforms. This is not a coordination-only engineering-management role. The successful candidate will remain technically hands-on while leading a small engineering team and owning technical delivery from architecture through production. The products combine modern application engineering, complex business workflows, enterprise integrations, data and selectively applied AI. What You Will Own • Define system architecture, service boundaries, API contracts and data models. • Design workflow and state-management patterns for long-running business processes. • Establish clear boundaries between deterministic business logic, workflow orchestration, human approvals and AI-assisted functionality. • Lead backend and full-stack engineers while remaining hands-on with design, code and code review. • Build integration patterns with ERP and other enterprise systems. • Establish engineering standards for testing, observability, security, CI/CD and operational readiness. • Ensure systems are resilient, auditable and appropriate for a high-trust environment. • Translate incomplete business requirements into practical technical designs and delivery plans. • Own technical readiness from initial implementation through production operation. • Work closely with product, business, security, platform and architecture teams. Required Experience • 10+ years of professional software-engineering experience. • 4+ years in a senior technical-lead, staff, principal or equivalent role. • Recent hands-on production engineering experience. • Strong backend engineering background. • Distributed systems, APIs, relational databases and enterprise integration. • Experience designing workflow-heavy or transaction-heavy systems. • Cloud-native architecture, containers, Kubernetes and CI/CD. • Modern authentication and authorization patterns. • Strong judgment around reliability, security, observability and testing. *** Only successful candidates will be contacted *** Show more Show less