Lead Backend Engineer (Level 5)

As a Lead Backend Engineer, you will own critical systems end-to-end, drive technical direction, and lead large initiatives. You will combine architecture, execution, and technical leadership to build scalable, reliable, and high-quality solutions that power Agoda's global platform. You will influence engineering decisions beyond your immediate team, mentor engineers, shape development practices, and help raise the organization's technical bar.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the architecture, design, and development of complex distributed systems at scale.
• Own the technical direction, delivery, and evolution of critical systems and platforms.
• Drive system design, API standards, software architecture, and engineering best practices across teams.
• Lead complex technical initiatives involving multiple services, teams, and stakeholders.
• Make key technical decisions, balancing business priorities with scalability, reliability, and maintainability goals.
• Remain an active contributor to production systems through regular coding, code reviews, system design, and technical problem-solving, balancing hands-on execution with leadership responsibilities.
• Mentor and coach engineers, helping raise technical capability, code quality, and engineering standards.
• Drive continuous improvements in development processes, engineering effectiveness, and agile ways of working.
• Align stakeholders and drive execution across cross-functional teams.
• Lead production stability, incident management, root-cause analysis, and long-term reliability improvements.
• Proactively identify opportunities to improve products, platforms, developer productivity, and customer experience

Requirements:

• 11+ years of experience building and operating large-scale backend systems in production environments.
• Proven experience delivering complex distributed systems at scale.
• Strong expertise in Java, Scala, Kotlin, or Go.
• Strong software architecture skills with a track record of driving architectural decisions within and across teams.
• Proven experience leading technical initiatives, projects, or engineering teams with end-to-end ownership.
• Recent and ongoing hands-on coding experience in production environments is required.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and architecture, API design and microservices, performance, scalability, system reliability, and system design for high-throughput, highly available applications.

Nice to Have:

• Experience building or owning large-scale platforms across multiple services or domains.
• Experience designing and operating event-driven architectures using technologies such as Kafka.
• Experience with cloud-native architectures on AWS or GCP. Strong understanding of CI/CD, DevOps, automation, and modern software delivery practices.
• Experience driving cross-team technical initiatives, platform modernization, or large-scale migrations.
• Familiarity with high-volume data systems, Spark, Hadoop, or related data platform technologies.
• Experience working in global product organizations with distributed engineering teams.