Principal Platform Engineer - Scale Backend Systems

AirAsia; Kuala Lumpur; On-site; MYR 360,000 - 600,000; Full time

Job summary

AirAsia MOVE is seeking a Principal Engineer - Platform in Kuala Lumpur to lead architectural strategy for MOVE's backend services. You will shape distributed systems, scale microservices, and mentor senior engineers across backend squads to support millions of users as we expand across ASEAN.

You'll drive decisions on technology, governance, and observability, partnering with product, security, infra, and business teams to align priorities and accelerate platform modernization and DevSecOps

Qualifications

• 10-18 years of backend engineering experience with 2+ years in principal/staff roles.
• Distributed systems, cloud-native architecture (GCP/AWS/Azure), microservices, data platforms.
• Experience designing resilient, scalable platforms at enterprise scale.
• Leadership in design reviews, governance across teams, and cross-team collaboration.
• Hands-on full-stack development, API design, data modeling, and IaC.
• Java (Spring Boot) or similar (Go, Python, Node.js).
• SQL (MySQL/PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (Redis, MongoDB).
• OAuth2/OIDC and event systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub).
• Frontend basics for backend integration (React Native/Native).
• Security, regulatory compliance, and cost optimization.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end architecture for large-scale systems focusing on scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
• Make high-impact technical decisions and guide trade-offs across domains.
• Set engineering standards, governance models, and best practices across teams.
• Lead architecture reviews, incident postmortems, and complex investigations.
• Mentor senior engineers and foster technical excellence.
• Collaborate with product, security, infra, and business teams to align priorities.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and drive platform modernization.
• Influence observability, DevSecOps, and developer productivity initiatives.
• Advise leadership on technical direction.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Cloud-native architecture

Microservices

Leadership

API design

Infrastructure as code

Java/Spring Boot

Databases (SQL/NoSQL)

Security & compliance

Observability/OpenTelemetry

DevSecOps

Mentoring

Governance

Tools

Kafka

Terraform

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

OAuth2

GCP

AWS

Azure

Job description

AirAsia MOVE is seeking a Principal Engineer - Platform in Kuala Lumpur to lead architectural strategy for MOVE's backend services. You will shape distributed systems, scale microservices, and mentor senior engineers across backend squads to support millions of users as we expand across ASEAN.

You'll drive decisions on technology, governance, and observability, partnering with product, security, infra, and business teams to align priorities and accelerate platform modernization and DevSecOps