Senior Application Engineer

Role overview

This position is focused on managing a large and business-critical portfolio of applications that support subsurface operations. The role sits within Digital Business Solutions and acts as the bridge between business teams and technology teams, ensuring the application landscape remains stable, secure, and aligned with operational needs across office, onshore, and offshore environments.

Job dimensions

• Oversee a portfolio of 30 complex applications.
• Support more than 50 onshore and offshore servers.
• Coordinate with 30 different vendors across the application portfolio.
• Handle about 15 parallel daily activities for the assigned business lines.
• Manage roughly 30 critical service requests every month.

Context and environment

Digital Business Solutions supports multiple office locations, as well as onshore and offshore installations. The Al Shaheen oil field depends on complex software and control systems that must remain highly available and reliable to keep operations running smoothly. It is a technically demanding environment built around customized, real-time, mission-critical petroleum applications, and it is continuing its digital transformation with greater use of digital tools across operations.

Key accountabilities

The role is responsible for building strong working relationships with the designated subsurface business lines, especially Drilling and Wells, Reservoir, and Geosciences. It requires translating business needs into practical technology support and solutions, while maintaining high standards for performance, availability, and security.

Core activities

• Act as the main contact for a defined set of application services used by the subsurface business lines, independently operating and supporting those systems to keep downtime as low as possible.
• Deliver specialist support for the software solutions used by the subsurface teams.
• Investigate and fix issues related to software, hardware, and network components within the supported solutions.
• Work with vendors, business groups, and internal Digital Business Solutions teams to maintain and enhance the supported applications.
• Make sure subsurface solutions connect properly with other platforms such as digital data systems, reporting tools, and other business applications.
• Lead the rollout of new solutions and technology updates, ensuring they fit business needs, company standards, internal processes, and accepted best practices.
• Partner with business stakeholders, Digital Business Solutions teams, and vendors to define and implement suitable solution architectures.
• Support testing activities and the release of upgrades and patches.
• Confirm that all managed software solutions remain aligned with company policies and relevant industry standards.
• Maintain accurate and current documentation for every solution under management.
• Handle contracts and software license arrangements for the subsurface application portfolio.
• Track and report service availability, license usage, resource consumption, and business value delivered by the managed solutions.

Competencies

• Delegate appropriately and communicate clearly.
• Adapt effectively to complex and changing situations.
• Show learning agility and contribute to innovation.
• Demonstrate emotional intelligence and cultural awareness.
• Build others’ capability and preserve institutional knowledge.
• Develop future talent.
• Support sustainability commitments.
• Encourage collaboration and a strong sense of community.
• Improve safety, technical capability, and business results.
• Lead through the organization’s values.
• Set direction and align with company plans.
• Strengthen accountability and continuous improvement.
• Think and act with stakeholder focus.

Education

A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Petroleum Engineering, or a related discipline is required.

Experience and skills needed

The ideal candidate brings 7 to 10 years of experience in the oil industry supporting subsurface software solutions, along with 7 to 10 years in petroleum solution implementation and maintenance, and 7 to 10 years working in an oil and gas organization. A strong grasp of IT domains such as networks, systems, applications, and databases is essential, along with leadership, project management, problem-solving, communication, and the ability to work independently under pressure while managing multiple priorities and change.

Additional requirements

• Strong leadership and project management ability.
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills.
• Comfortable working independently and under pressure.
• Able to manage multiple tasks and support change effectively.
• Fluent in spoken and written English.
• Strong interpersonal skills.