Staff Software Engineer – Backend (Level 4)

About the role

Agoda is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the design, implementation, and reliability of a critical backend service. You will own the end‑to‑end lifecycle of high‑scale distributed systems that power the global travel platform.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build and operate scalable micro‑services and distributed systems with high availability and low latency.
• Lead complex feature development, drive API design, and enforce engineering best practices across the team.
• Own performance, scalability, reliability and fault‑tolerance of your services, including production issue handling and root‑cause analysis.
• Mentor engineers, proactively identify technical gaps, and make independent architectural trade‑off decisions.

Required profile

• 8–12 years of backend engineering experience with a track record of owning large‑scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated ability to take initiative beyond assigned tasks and influence technical direction.
• Comfort making decisions under ambiguity and communicating trade‑offs to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

Required skills

• Strong proficiency in Java, Kotlin, Scala or Go.
• Deep understanding of microservices architecture, REST APIs, and system design.
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases, performance tuning, scalability and concurrency.
• Familiarity with modern tooling such as CI/CD pipelines, automation and observability.