Lead Software Engineer (Backend / Distributed Systems) — Bangkok Relocation Provided

About the Company

At Agoda we bridge the world through travel. Part of Booking Holdings, Agoda has a diverse global team working across millions of hotels, holiday properties, flights, and experiences. This position is based in Bangkok, Thailand (Relocation package is provided).

In Agoda’s Back End Engineering department we build scalable, fault-tolerant systems and APIs that host core business logic across inventory, pricing, product information, customer data, bookings, payments and more. Our mission-critical systems see dozens of releases per day, so we rely on strong CI/CD, testing, observability and self-healing systems. We use languages such as Scala and Go, data technologies like Kafka and Aerospike, and agile development practices.

Responsibilities

• Architect and develop highly scalable, mission-critical backend systems, owning major parts of Agoda’s platform from long-term vision to implementation.
• Write exemplary code, raise the engineering bar, and provide hands-on technical leadership impacting 40+ engineers.
• Define architecture for critical systems and lead large-scale cross-team initiatives to improve service quality, code quality, and technical design.
• Drive organisation-wide excellence in observability, testing, debugging, software quality and operational reliability.
• Identify and implement optimizations across the stack to improve cost, efficiency, delivery velocity and developer experience.
• Foster inclusive collaboration, unblock teams, influence technical roadmaps, and communicate complex technical trade-offs to stakeholders and senior leadership.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering with deep hands-on technical expertise and strong architectural leadership.
• Proven ability to design and evolve architecture across multiple teams, platforms, or critical system domains.
• Strong experience owning production services end-to-end: design, development, deployment, monitoring and long-term evolution.
• Demonstrated success leading large-scale technical initiatives in complex engineering organisations.
• Expertise in software quality practices, testing strategy, observability, debugging, system reliability and operational excellence.
• Strong backend engineering skills with proficiency in languages such as Kotlin, Scala, or Java.
• Broad engineering understanding beyond backend, including trade-offs across frontend, mobile and data analytics; ability to research and make sound technical decisions.
• Strong communication skills, ability to explain complex technical details to stakeholders, and track record of mentoring and building a culture of feedback and continuous improvement.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Benefits

• Full relocation and onboarding support: Visa sponsorship for you and your family; flights, settling-in allowance and temporary housing; dedicated relocation and settling-in advisors; relocation buddy program and community events.
• Family & expat benefits: Partner and children support (school search, legal, etc.), international health insurance, flexible home visit support.
• Agoda perks: Hybrid working at Bangkok HQ, professional growth and learning budget, employee resource groups for diverse cultures and backgrounds.