Staff Software Engineer - BackEnd (Level 4) | Gurugram, IND

Agoda; Hyderabad; On-site; INR 3,000,000 - 5,400,000; Full time

Job summary

Agoda is seeking an experienced Staff Backend Engineer to design and develop scalable distributed systems powering a global travel platform. You will own end-to-end technical decisions, balance trade-offs, and mentor teams while delivering high-availability services.

You’ll work on microservices, APIs, and data stores with modern tech like Kafka, Aerospike, and cloud deployments. Collaboration with product and business stakeholders is essential to prioritize impactful work.

Qualifications

• 8–12 years of backend engineering experience.
• Proven experience building distributed systems at scale.
• Expertise in Java, Kotlin, Scala, or Go.
• Strong understanding of microservices architecture, REST APIs, databases, and performance.

Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable distributed systems and microservices.
• Lead development of complex features and technical initiatives end-to-end.
• Drive system design, API design, and engineering best practices.
• Own scalability, performance, reliability, and fault tolerance of services.
• Mentor engineers and influence engineering standards across teams.
• Partner with product and business stakeholders to translate requirements into technical priorities.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Java

Kotlin

Scala

Go

Microservices

REST APIs

SQL/NoSQL

Performance

Job description

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.

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 drive the design and development of scalable distributed systems, working on high-impact backend services. Beyond writing code, you'll be expected to identify problems before they're assigned to you, make independent calls on ambiguous technical trade-offs, and influence how your team and adjacent teams build software. You'll combine hand-on coding, system design, and technical leadership—owning outcomes, not just deliverables, and helping shape engineering practices beyond your immediate scope.

What You Will Do

• Design and build scalable distributed systems and microservices
• Lead development of complex features and technical initiatives end-to-end
• Drive system design, API design, and engineering best practices
• Own scalability, performance, reliability, and fault tolerance of services
• Optimize high-throughput, low-latency systems
• Proactively identify gaps, risks, or improvement opportunities beyond your assigned scope, and drive them to resolution without waiting to be asked
• Make independent architectural and technical trade-off decisions, and be accountable for the outcomes
• Contribute to cross-team collaboration and system alignment; influence engineering standards and practices beyond your immediate team
• Partner with product and business stakeholders to translate business needs into technical priorities, and technical constraints into business context
• Stay hand-on with coding and system design
• Mentor engineers with a structured approach, supporting overall team capability growth
• Participate in technical decision-making and architectural improvements
• Handle production issues, RCA, and drive continuous improvement

What We’re Looking For

Technical:

• 8-12 years of backend engineering experience
• Strong experience building distributed systems at scale
• 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 scope — initiatives you drove because you saw the need, not because you were told
• Comfort making decisions under ambiguity and owning the consequences, technical and business
• Experience communicating trade-offs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, adjusting your framing accordingly
• Demonstrated impact mentoring or growing other engineers, 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

#Delhi #Gurgaon #Gurugram #Bangalore #Bengaluru #Chennai #Noida #DelhiNCR #Pune #Mumbai #Hyderabad

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.

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