Staff Backend Engineer – High‑Scale Distributed Systems

About the role

Agoda is looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to own the design, reliability and evolution of a critical service or domain. You will work on high‑scale, fault‑tolerant distributed systems that power a global travel platform serving millions of users daily.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build and own scalable micro‑services and distributed systems within your domain.
• Lead development of complex features and technical initiatives end‑to‑end.
• Drive system and API design, engineering best practices, and ensure scalability, performance, reliability and fault tolerance.
• Identify gaps, risks or improvement opportunities proactively and resolve them without waiting for direction.
• Make independent architectural and technical trade‑off decisions and be accountable for outcomes.
• Collaborate with adjacent teams, product and business stakeholders to translate needs into technical priorities.
• Mentor engineers, handle production incidents, conduct root‑cause analysis and lead improvements.

Required profile

• 8–12 years of backend engineering experience building and owning distributed systems at scale.
• Proven ability to take ownership beyond assigned tasks and drive initiatives independently.
• Comfort making decisions under ambiguity and communicating trade‑offs to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Demonstrated impact mentoring or growing engineers with concrete outcomes.

Required skills

• Strong experience with Java, Kotlin, Scala or Go.
• Deep understanding of microservices architecture, REST APIs, system design, and concurrency.
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g., Aerospike, Cassandra, MongoDB).
• Familiarity with event‑driven systems such as Kafka.
• Knowledge of performance, scalability and high‑throughput, low‑latency system optimization.