Lead Software Engineer - Financial Services

We Are Foodics! a leading restaurant management ecosystem and payment tech provider. Founded in 2014 with headquarters in Riyadh and offices across 5 countries, including UAE, Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait. We are currently serving customers and partners in over 35 different countries worldwide. Our innovative products have successfully processed over 6 billion (yes, billion with a B) orders so far! making Foodics one of the most rapidly evolving SaaS companies to ever emerge from the MENA region. Also Foodics has achieved three rounds of funding, with the latest raising $170 million in the largest SaaS funding round in MENA, boosting its innovation capabilities to better serve business owners.

Foodics Financial Services builds the money products that help restaurants and merchants across the region run their businesses: payments, capital, and cashflow tools. We operate in a regulated environment (SAMA in Saudi Arabia, with expansion into the UAE), which means we care deeply about reliability, security, and correctness. We also move fast and ship products merchants actually feel.

We're looking for a Lead Engineer who thinks like a product owner, builds like a full-stack engineer, and works AI-first by default.

• Own problems end to end. Take ambiguous business problems from discovery through design, build, launch, and iteration. Work across backend services, APIs, data, and frontend as needed.
• Spot the gaps. Find what's missing or broken on both sides: a flow that confuses merchants, a reconciliation process that doesn't scale, a service that will fail under the next 10x of volume. Then drive the fix, even when nobody asked.
• Shape product direction. Partner with Product, Design, Risk, and Compliance to define what we build and why. Challenge requirements, propose alternatives, and bring data to the conversation.
• Set the technical bar. Lead architecture decisions for systems that handle real money: idempotency, consistency, auditability, security, and observability built in from day one.
• Lead the AI-first shift. Use AI tools and agents to multiply your own output, and help the team adopt them well. Identify where AI can improve our products and our engineering workflow, and build it.
• Multiply the team. Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, raise the quality of design reviews and code reviews, and make the people around you better.
• Pick the right tool. Evaluate and adopt languages, frameworks, and platforms based on the problem, not habit.

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping and owning production systems.
• Genuine full-stack ability: comfortable designing backend services and data models, and building solid, usable frontends.
• A product mindset: you care about the user and the business outcome, not just the ticket. You can explain why something should be built, not only how.
• Technology-agnostic: you've worked across multiple languages and stacks and pick up new ones quickly.
• AI-first habits: you use AI coding assistants, agents, and LLM APIs daily and have opinions about where they help and where they don't.
• Strong systems thinking: distributed systems, APIs, databases, and the trade-offs between them.
• Clear communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• High ownership and comfort with ambiguity.

• Experience in fintech, payments, lending, or other regulated domains (PCI DSS, SAMA, or similar).
• Experience building AI-powered product features (LLM integrations, RAG, agents, evaluation).
• Cloud infrastructure and DevOps experience (containers, CI/CD, observability).
• Experience with B2B or merchant-facing products.