Technology leader who builds and scales enterprise platforms, with deep roots in financial services.
Fifteen years building and leading large scale enterprise platforms. Now based in Riyadh, working at the centre of the Gulf's transformation.
My work has taken me through some of North America's largest financial institutions: Citi, Credit Suisse, MetLife and National Bank of Canada. Most recently, before the move to Saudi Arabia, I was Technical Lead at National Bank, directing a wealth management platform from its earliest days. That covered the cloud infrastructure, the architecture, the security model and the delivery pipeline, along with the conversations needed to get all of it signed off.
I relocated to Riyadh at the start of 2025, drawn by the pace of change across financial services in the Kingdom. My role sits between strategy and engineering. I help leadership make sound technical decisions and help engineering teams deliver against them. The space between vision and delivery is where I am most useful.
The Gulf's financial infrastructure is being rebuilt from the ground up.I want to be part of doing it right.
Across the Kingdom and the wider GCC, large organisations are modernising their core platforms at pace, with financial services leading the way. I have spent my career shipping systems that hold up at enterprise scale, whatever the domain.
Most enterprise programmes break down at the point where business intent meets engineering reality. I have spent fifteen years living in that space. I translate vision into architecture and make sure the delivery team ships what was actually designed.
Saudi Arabia is in the middle of one of the most ambitious economic transformations anywhere, and financial services sit close to its centre. Sectors outside oil now account for more than half of national output and continue to grow ahead of the global average. I bring the rigour of North American enterprise delivery and pair it with a real understanding of the Kingdom's regulatory landscape and the goals set out in Vision 2030.
Senior executives and C-levels need a technology partner who can speak both languages. I translate complex technical decisions into clear business outcomes, lead programmes from the first whiteboard session through to production, build and mentor the teams that deliver them, and stay accountable for the outcome long after the strategy deck is closed.
I have designed and delivered cloud infrastructure from scratch for demanding enterprise environments. AWS at the core: EKS, Aurora PostgreSQL, API Gateway, OpenSearch. Event driven architecture with Kafka. Multi region high availability and disaster recovery built for regulated, high stakes systems.
API design, microservices, identity and access management, data architecture, integration patterns. The foundations that allow a platform to scale securely and adapt without being rebuilt every two years.
CI/CD pipelines that embed security from the first commit rather than bolting it on at the end. Terraform, Helm, Harness, Jenkins, Bitbucket. Automation that actually removes risk rather than just accelerating it.
Enterprise IAM using Okta. Role based access control, SSO, LDAP and zero trust security models appropriate for regulated environments.
Delivering platforms under serious compliance requirements across financial institutions in North America and the Kingdom. I have worked within frameworks ranging from FATCA to SAMA's cybersecurity and cloud expectations, and I build security and auditability into the delivery process rather than treating it as a final gate.
Clear ways to work together, from a standing seat at the table to leading a full programme.
Ongoing technical counsel to executive leadership and architecture boards. Reviewing the big calls, weighing the risks, and sitting beside you on the decisions that are hard to reverse later.
An independent assessment of a live platform or programme: the architecture, the security, the compliance readiness and the health of the delivery pipeline, with a practical roadmap and clear priorities.
Embedded, full time technical leadership for a defined transformation programme: from strategy through to production, building the team that carries it forward after the engagement ends.
If you are modernising a platform, building out a technical team or planning a transformation programme, I would like to hear from you.
info@alitariq.ca ✦