Engineering Lead / Principal Engineer

Engineering Lead / Principal Engineer — Enterprise Platforms & Automation Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE Employment: Full-time 12 month contract to permThe Role We are seeking a hands-on Engineering Lead / Principal Engineer to lead the architectureand delivery of complex enterprise digital products and automation platforms.This is not a coordination-only engineering-management role. The successful candidatewill remain technically hands-on while leading a small engineering team and owningtechnical 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 businessprocesses.
• Establish clear boundaries between deterministic business logic, workfloworchestration, human approvals and AI-assisted functionality.
• Lead backend and full-stack engineers while remaining hands-on with design, codeand code review.
• Build integration patterns with ERP and other enterprise systems.
• Establish engineering standards for testing, observability, security, CI/CD andoperational readiness.
• Ensure systems are resilient, auditable and appropriate for a high-trustenvironment.
• Translate incomplete business requirements into practical technical designs anddelivery 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 ***