Lead Backend Engineer – Level 5 (Gurugram)

About the role

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, high‑quality solutions that power Agoda’s global travel platform.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design and development of complex distributed systems at scale.
• Own the technical direction, delivery and evolution of critical 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.
• Contribute hands‑on to production systems through coding, code reviews and problem‑solving.
• Mentor and coach engineers to raise technical capability and code quality.
• Drive continuous improvements in development processes and agile ways of working.
• Align stakeholders and drive execution across cross‑functional teams.
• Lead production stability, incident management and long‑term reliability improvements.

Required profile

• 11+ years experience building and operating large‑scale backend systems in production.
• Proven experience delivering complex distributed systems at scale.
• Strong expertise in Java, Scala, Kotlin or Go.
• Demonstrated software architecture skills with a track record of driving architectural decisions.
• Experience leading technical initiatives or engineering teams with end‑to‑end ownership.
• Recent hands‑on coding experience in production environments.

Required skills

• Java
• Scala
• Kotlin
• Go
• Kafka
• Aerospike
• Distributed systems and microservices
• API design
• High‑throughput, high‑availability applications
• CI/CD, automation and observability
• Cloud‑native architectures on AWS or GCP
• Spark and Hadoop (nice to have)