Staff Engineer

Agoda Company Pte. Ltd.; Gurugram District; On-site; INR 4,500,000 - 7,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Agoda Company Pte. Ltd. is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own design and reliability for a critical service end-to-end, from architecture through production. You will combine coding, system design, and technical ownership while raising the bar for your team.

You will lead the development of scalable microservices, drive API design and best practices, and ensure performance and fault tolerance. Mentoring teammates and collaborating with product stakeholders are key parts of the role.

Qualifications

• 8–12 years of backend engineering experience.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Proactively identify gaps, risks, or improvement opportunities in your domain, and drive them to resolution without waiting to be asked.
• 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.

Skills

Java

Kotlin

Scala

Go

Tools

Kafka

RabbitMQ

AWS/GCP

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

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.

Responsibilities:

• 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 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.

Requirements:

• 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.
• A track record of taking ownership beyond assigned tasks by driving initiatives within your domain because you saw the need.
• Comfort making decisions under ambiguity and owning the technical and business consequences 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.

Nice To Have:

• Experience building large-scale consumer or marketplace platforms.
• Exposure to event-driven systems such as Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• Experience with NoSQL databases such as Cassandra, MongoDB, or Aerospike.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience working in Agile or Scrum environments.