staff software engineer

Job Overview

What youll do

• Architect systems spanning multiple teams, anticipating future use cases and designing to minimize the cost of change.
• Drive convergence of shared services across business units, actively resisting fork-and-diverge, and reducing the drift.
• Set code quality, testing and review standards for your teams, including the conventions that make AI-assisted development safe at speed.
• Lead the difficult investigations: diagnose issues spanning your domain and adjacent ones, and mentor others on systematic debugging.
• Own observability for your domain and build a culture of it across teams, using both operational and business metrics to drive stability and performance work.
• Lead secure design reviews and partner with the security function to apply DZs security strategy across your teams.
• Partner with fraud and risk stakeholders to build controls into your domain, balancing fraud loss and chargeback exposure against customer friction on a payment surface that carries real abuse exposure in different markets.
• Ensure epics and cross-team dependencies are broken down, understood and resolvable without teams waiting on each other, and drive short cycle time.
• Mentor within and beyond your team, facilitate cross-team decisions with genuine buy-in, and decide engineering work for your teams based on strategy, contributing to org-level engineering strategy as it takes shape.

What youll bring

• 8+ years building and operating production software, with a track record of owning architecture that spans several teams and outliving the org chart it was designed under.
• Deep experience in at least one of DZs stacks (TypeScript, Go, C#) with the range to reason credibly across all of them, plus solid Postgres and AWS depth.
• Evidence of consolidating forked or duplicated services, or of setting standards that other teams adopted because they were good, not because they were mandated.
• A security and fraud lens applied by default: OWASP fluency, secure design instincts, and an understanding of what abuse looks like on a payments and digital-fulfilment surface.
• Influence without authority: the ability to build relationships across teams, foster healthy disagreement, and guide a group of strong engineers to a decision theyll actually stand behind.
• Judgement about cost and value, including where AI leverage genuinely saves time and where it introduces risk that someone will pay for later.
• Immediate, large-scale impact on a high-growth business.
• Top-of-the-market compensation packages.
• Work alongside top regional talent, with team members from Talabat, Careem, Etisalat, and more.