Platform Engineering

About The company:

The company is a construction-tech company headquartered in AL Khobar,KSA, building the connected-worker platform for large-scale construction and industrial sites. Our hardware - smart helmets, anchors, and gateways - feeds a real-time SaaS platform that gives site teams worker location, safety compliance, automated mustering, and productivity analytics. We operate across major projects in the GCC and are growing fast. We are building for the long term.

About the Role

WC3 is our 3.0 platform - the SaaS core that connects IoT hardware to customer workflows. It is pre-launch, in active formation, and deliberately modeled on the architectural patterns behind ontology-driven, pipeline-first, and built to serve AI agents as first-class consumers alongside human users.

As WC3 Squad Lead, you are the accountable owner of the platform. You set the architecture, build and lead the team, and hold the bar for engineering quality. You will lead a team of Senior engineers - you will be joining a small, senior group with high autonomy and direct product impact.

This is a senior engineering leadership role. You have led teams before: hired engineers, managed performance, built culture, and earned trust at both the technical and organizational level. You think in systems and org design, not just code. You are also a serious, daily user of AI coding tools - Claude Code and Codex in particular - and you follow the AI model landscape closely enough to give the team grounded, current guidance.

What Success Looks Like - First 6 Months

• You understand the WC3 platform deeply: the architecture, the ownership areas, the open design decisions, and where the current codebase needs the most attention. You can lead an architecture walkthrough for any platform area.

• You have run at least one meaningful hiring process, made a hiring decision, and the team is measurably stronger than when you joined.

• The contribution standard is operational: engineers open structured issues, scope their changes to the right components, and submit PRs that are small enough to review and explicit enough to teach the platform.

• The AIP layer - the agent runtime, MCP surface, and AI-powered product features - has a clear technical direction with an accepted architecture decision behind it.

• Stakeholders trust you as the person who owns the platform - not just its code, but its direction.

Key Responsibilities

1. Build & Lead the Squad

• Own hiring end-to-end for WC3: define the bar, run the process, make decisions. You have hired senior engineers before and know what good looks like at that level.

• Manage performance directly - set clear expectations, give continuous feedback, run meaningful reviews, and act decisively when someone is not meeting the bar.

• Build a high-ownership, contribution-first engineering culture. WC3 uses an earned ownership model: authority over platform areas accrues through demonstrated contribution, not seniority or title. You run this model and ratify ownership promotions.

• Mentor engineers at every level - from onboarding new contributors to developing senior engineers toward platform ownership. Your track record includes engineers who grew significantly under your leadership.

• Own the squad's delivery: run agile ceremonies, plan sprints, and partner with Product to translate the platform roadmap into shippable increments.

2. Own the Platform Architecture

WC3 is modeled on the patterns behind Palantir Foundry - not as a copy, but as a design reference. You bring the mental model: ontology-driven data, governed pipelines, lineage, a structured SDK surface, and an application layer built on top. Whether your experience comes from Foundry directly or from an equivalent enterprise data platform, you think in these patterns and can make WC3 design decisions from first principles.

• Own the architecture across the platform's core areas: data ontology and semantic layer, pipelines and lineage, data sources and streaming backbone, developer SDK and API surface, authorization and governance, application layer and dashboards, and DevOps/release infrastructure.

• Lead Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) for the platform - write them, amend them, ratify them. Treat old decisions as revisable when evidence or implementation pressure shows a better path.

• Design for high availability, low latency, and horizontal scalability. Own data modeling across relational, time-series, and vector stores.

• Drive the C#/.NET backend while remaining genuinely flexible about the stack. WC3 is pre-launch - you can reason credibly across languages (Go, Python, Node.js, Java) and make stack decisions that serve the product, not habit.

3. Engineering Standards & Quality

• Enforce the contribution standard: every feature proposal starts with a scoped issue that names the concept being implemented, explains the product value, describes the WC3 design and affected components, and links the relevant architecture decision. No code before clarity.

• Champion code-architecture tooling (WC3 uses CodeBoarding) so contributors understand the component they are changing, its neighbors, and the health warnings they are accepting or fixing before they open a PR.

• Raise engineering maturity across WC3 repositories: test coverage, CI gating, release management, and production monitoring against SLAs.

• Embed security and compliance into the platform - data residency, encryption, audit logging, access controls, and responsible-AI guardrails on all AI-generated outputs.

4. Cross-functional Collaboration & Roadmap

• Collaborate closely with Hardware, Product, and Field Engineering to align the platform with real site needs.

• Contribute to the technical roadmap and evaluate new AI and platform technologies with honest, grounded judgment - distinguish what advances the product from what adds complexity.

• Represent the platform credibly to customers, partners, and leadership - able to give a clear picture of where WC3 is, what it is becoming, and why the architectural choices hold.

Required Qualifications

Experience

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a clear progression from senior IC to engineering leadership.

• 5+ years directly managing engineers - leading teams, owning hiring, running performance cycles. Leading a project is not the same as leading a team; this role requires the latter.

• A track record of hiring: you have built or significantly grown an engineering team and made independent senior-level hiring decisions.

• Proven experience designing and delivering scalable, multi-tenant SaaS or large-scale distributed systems in production - including the hard parts: incidents, migrations, and scaling failures.

• Experience owning a product or platform across its full lifecycle, from architecture through production operation.

Technical Depth & Stack Flexibility

We care about depth of engineering thinking, not stack loyalty. WC3's current backend is .NET but the platform is in formation - the right person can work across ecosystems and make decisions that serve the product.

• Comfortable across multiple backend languages - C#/.NET, Go, Python, Java, Node.js. Opinionated about trade-offs, not attached to one stack.

• Frontend depth in TypeScript with a modern framework; comfortable with testing tooling (Vitest, Playwright or equivalent) and a fast CI/CD release flow.

• API design (REST and/or GraphQL), OpenAPI/OSDK codegen, and secure authentication patterns (OAuth 2.0, JWT, SSO).

• Databases across the spectrum: relational, time-series, and vector stores - with the judgment to choose the right store for each workload.

• Cloud platforms (GCP and/or AWS), Docker/Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD. Comfortable moving between cloud providers.

• Experience with ontology-driven, governed data platforms - whether Palantir Foundry/AIP, Databricks Unity Catalog, or an equivalent enterprise data platform. Direct Foundry/AIP experience is a significant advantage and will be heavily weighted. What matters most is that you think in the patterns: ontologies, pipelines, lineage, governed SDK surfaces, and an application layer built on top.

• LLM integration patterns: prompt engineering, RAG, tool/function calling, MCP serving, agent runtime design, and output evaluation.

AI Tooling - Daily Practice

• Primary daily experience with Claude Code and Codex, GitHub AI coding tools - used in real engineering work, with formed opinions about when to trust their output and when not to.

• Current awareness of the AI model landscape: practical differences between Claude, GPT-4o / o-series (Codex), Gemini, DeepSeek, and open-weight models for code generation, long-context reasoning, tool use, and structured output.

• Tracks AI trends actively - model releases, agentic framework developments, MCP ecosystem evolution - and can translate this into concrete, grounded team guidance.

Communication

• Exceptional written and spoken English. This is a hard requirement. You write clearly and precisely - issues, ADRs, design documents, and stakeholder updates are well-structured and unambiguous. You speak in meetings with the same clarity. Non-native speakers are welcome; strong command of the language is not optional.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct hands-on Palantir Foundry and/or AIP experience - built real capabilities on the live Foundry surface, not documentation-only familiarity.

• Experience with agentic frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, or equivalent) and multi-agent orchestration patterns.

• Familiarity with IoT or connected-device data ingestion and device-to-cloud communication.

• Enterprise integrations - SSO/identity providers, ERP/PM systems such as Oracle or Procore.

• Experience in construction, industrial, or field-operations software.

• Knowledge of data residency and compliance requirements (KSA/CST, ISO 27001, SOC 2).

What We Offer

• Competitive salary, performance bonus, and equity participation.

• High-autonomy role with direct product and company impact - you are building a platform from the ground up, not maintaining an inherited codebase.

• A small, senior engineering team where your decisions matter and your name is on the architecture.

• Relocation support for candidates joining from outside KSA.

• Health insurance, annual flights, and standard Company's benefits package.