Lead Software Engineer - Financial Services

About the role

Foodics Financial Services builds money products for restaurants and merchants across the region, covering payments, capital and cashflow tools. It operates in a regulated environment (SAMA in Saudi Arabia, expanding into the UAE) and values reliability, security and correctness. The company is looking for a Lead Engineer who thinks like a product owner, builds like a full-stack engineer and works AI-first by default.

Key responsibilities

• Own problems end to end, taking ambiguous business problems from discovery through design, build, launch and iteration, across backend services, APIs, data and frontend as needed.
• Spot gaps in flows, reconciliation processes and services, then drive the fixes.
• Partner with Product, Design, Risk and Compliance to define what is built and why, challenge requirements and bring data to the conversation.
• Lead architecture decisions for systems handling real money, with idempotency, consistency, auditability, security and observability built in from day one.
• Use AI tools and agents to multiply your own output and help the team adopt them, and identify where AI can improve products and engineering workflow.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers and raise the quality of design and code reviews.
• Evaluate and adopt languages, frameworks and platforms based on the problem, not habit.

Required profile

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping and owning production systems.
• Genuine full-stack ability: designing backend services and data models and building solid, usable frontends.
• Product mindset: cares about the user and business outcome, not just the ticket, and can explain why something should be built.
• Technology-agnostic: worked across multiple languages and stacks and picks up new ones quickly.
• Strong systems thinking: distributed systems, APIs, databases and their trade-offs.
• Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders, high ownership and comfort with ambiguity.

Nice to have

• Fintech, payments, lending or other regulated domain experience (PCI DSS, SAMA).
• Building AI-powered features (LLM integrations, RAG, agents, evaluation).
• Cloud infrastructure and DevOps (containers, CI/CD, observability).
• B2B or merchant-facing product experience.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation, including bonuses and the potential for shares.
• Regular training and an annual learning stipend.
• A team of over 30 nationalities working in 14 countries.
• Autonomy, mentoring and challenging goals.