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About this role
About Agoda
At Agoda, we bridge the world through travel. Our story began in 2005, when two lifelong friends and entrepreneurs, driven by their passion for travel, launched Agoda to make it easier for everyone to explore the world.
Today, we are part of Booking Holdings [NASDAQ: BKNG], with a diverse team of over 7,000 people from 90 countries, working together in offices around the globe. Every day, we connect people to destinations and experiences, with our great deals across our millions of hotels and holiday properties, flights, and experiences worldwide.
No two days are the same at Agoda. Data and technology are at the heart of our culture, fueling our curiosity and innovation. If you’re ready to begin your best journey and help build travel for the world, join us.
About our Team
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.
Our systems run with high availability, low latency, and zero-downtime expectations, powered by modern technologies such as Scala, Go, Java, Kotlin, Kafka, and Aerospike, along with strong foundations in CI/CD, automation, and observability.
We ship fast—often dozens of releases a day—and design systems that are resilient, self-healing, and built to scale globally.
The Opportunity
As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll own the design and reliability of a critical service or domain end-to-end — from architecture through production. Beyond writing code, you'll be expected to identify problems before they're assigned to you, make independent calls on ambiguous technical trade-offs within your domain, and raise the technical bar for your immediate team. You'll combine hands-on coding, system design, and technical ownership — accountable for outcomes within your service, and a trusted technical voice when your work touches adjacent teams.
What You will Do
- Design, build, and own scalable distributed systems and microservices within your domain
- Lead development of complex features and technical initiatives end-to-end, within your service or team
- Drive system design, API design, and engineering best practices for your team
- Own scalability, performance, reliability, and fault tolerance of the services you're responsible for
- Optimize high-throughput, low-latency systems
- Proactively identify gaps, risks, or improvement opportunities in your domain, and drive them to resolution without waiting to be asked
- Make independent architectural and technical trade-off decisions within your service's scope, and be accountable for the outcomes
- Collaborate with adjacent teams when your service's boundaries or dependencies require it, and raise engineering standards within your own team
- Partner with your product and business stakeholders to translate business needs into technical priorities, and technical constraints into business context
- Stay hands-on with coding and system design
- Mentor engineers on your team with a structured approach, supporting their growth
- Handle production issues within your domain, drive RCA, and lead follow-through improvements
What We’re Looking For
Technical
- 8–12 years of backend engineering experience
- Strong experience building and owning distributed systems at scale, within a service or domain
- Expertise in: Java, Kotlin, Scala, or Go
- Strong understanding of microservices architecture, REST APIs & system design, SQL/NoSQL databases, and performance, scalability, and concurrency
- Strong coding and problem-solving ability
Beyond the technical bar:
- A track record of taking ownership beyond your assigned tasks — initiatives you drove within your domain because you saw the need, not because you were told
- Comfort making decisions under ambiguity and owning the consequences, technical and business, within your area of ownership
- Experience communicating trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, adjusting your framing accordingly
- Demonstrated impact mentoring or growing engineers on your team, with concrete outcomes, not just informal help
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), CI/CD pipelines
- Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments
Please review our Hiring Process Guidelines before your interview — click here to learn how interviewing at Agoda works.
Discover more about working at Agoda
- Agoda Careers https://careersatagoda.com
- Facebook https://www.facebook.com/agodacareers/
- LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/agoda
- YouTube https://www.youtube.com/agodalife
Equal Opportunity Employer
At Agoda, we pride ourselves on being a company represented by people of all different backgrounds and orientations. We prioritize attracting diverse talent and cultivating an inclusive environment that encourages collaboration and innovation. Employment at Agoda is based solely on a person’s merit and qualifications. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, age, race, color, national origin, religion, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, citizenship, veteran or military status, and other legally protected characteristics.
We will keep your application on file so that we can consider you for future vacancies and you can always ask to have your details removed from the file. For more details please read our privacy policy.
Disclaimer
We do not accept any terms or conditions, nor do we recognize any agency’s representation of a candidate, from unsolicited third-party or agency submissions. If we receive unsolicited or speculative CVs, we reserve the right to contact and hire the candidate directly without any obligation to pay a recruitment fee.
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