Staff Backend Engineer (Level 4)

At Agoda, our Backend Engineering team builds high-scale, fault-tolerant distributed systems that power a global travel platform serving millions of users daily. We own mission-critical domains across inventory, pricing, booking, payments, and customer/partner platforms.

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will drive the design and development of scalable, distributed systems and high-impact backend services. You'll combine hands-on coding, system design, and technical leadership to build complex systems and influence engineering practices.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build scalable distributed systems and microservices.
• Lead development of complex features and technical initiatives end-to-end.
• Drive system design, API design, and engineering best practices.
• Own scalability, performance, reliability, and fault tolerance of services.
• Optimize high-throughput, low-latency systems.
• Contribute to cross-team collaboration and system alignment.
• Stay hands-on with coding and system design (50-60%).
• Mentor engineers and support overall team capability growth.
• Participate in technical decision-making and architectural improvements.
• Handle production issues, RCA, and continuous improvements.

Requirements:

• 8-12 years of backend engineering experience.
• Strong experience building distributed systems at scale.
• Expertise in Java, Kotlin, or Scala.
• Strong understanding of microservices architecture, REST APIs, system design, SQL/NoSQL databases, performance, scalability, and concurrency.
• Strong coding + problem-solving ability.
• Ability to contribute to technical decisions and mentor engineers.

Nice to Have:

• Experience building large-scale consumer or marketplace platforms.
• Exposure to event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Experience with NoSQL databases (Cassandra, MongoDB, Aerospike).
• Familiarity with cloud (AWS/GCP) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments.