Lead Backend Engineer (Level 5)

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, and high-quality solutions that power Agoda's global platform. You will influence engineering decisions beyond your immediate team, mentor engineers, shape development practices, and help raise the organization's technical bar.
Responsibilities:
Lead the architecture, design, and development of complex distributed systems at scale.
Own the technical direction, delivery, and evolution of critical systems and 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 goals.
Remain an active contributor to production systems through regular coding, code reviews, system design, and technical problem-solving, balancing hands-on execution with leadership responsibilities.
Mentor and coach engineers, helping raise technical capability, code quality, and engineering standards.
Drive continuous improvements in development processes, engineering effectiveness, and agile ways of working.
Align stakeholders and drive execution across cross-functional teams.
Lead production stability, incident management, root-cause analysis, and long-term reliability improvements.
Proactively identify opportunities to improve products, platforms, developer productivity, and customer experience
Requirements:
11+ years of experience building and operating large-scale backend systems in production environments.
Proven experience delivering complex distributed systems at scale.
Strong expertise in Java, Scala, Kotlin, or Go.
Strong software architecture skills with a track record of driving architectural decisions within and across teams.
Proven experience leading technical initiatives, projects, or engineering teams with end-to-end ownership.
Recent and ongoing hands-on coding experience in production environments is required.
Deep expertise in distributed systems and architecture, API design and microservices, performance, scalability, system reliability, and system design for high-throughput, highly available applications.
Nice to Have:
Experience building or owning large-scale platforms across multiple services or domains.
Experience designing and operating event-driven architectures using technologies such as Kafka.
Experience with cloud-native architectures on AWS or GCP. Strong understanding of CI/CD, DevOps, automation, and modern software delivery practices.
Experience driving cross-team technical initiatives, platform modernization, or large-scale migrations.
Familiarity with high-volume data systems, Spark, Hadoop, or related data platform technologies.
Experience working in global product organizations with distributed engineering teams.

Experience
10-14 yrs