Staff Engineer - Platform Services

AirAsia; Kuala Lumpur; On-site; MYR 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading ASEAN-focused travel company is seeking a Staff Engineer in Kuala Lumpur to drive technical excellence by overseeing the technology roadmap for key OTA services. This role involves designing scalable systems and mentoring developers in a collaborative environment. Candidates should have 8–14 years of experience in backend development, including a leadership role, and must possess strong skills in cloud architecture and debugging. Competitive compensation is offered.

Benefits

Competitive compensation

Career development opportunities

Collaborative and diverse team environment

Qualifications

• Commercial experience in backend development for 8-14 years.
• At least 3 years in a leadership or senior architect role.
• Experience in e-commerce or travel domain is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Provide architectural oversight and review service designs.
• Define and enforce coding standards and design patterns.
• Mentor engineers on system design and operational excellence.
• Troubleshoot production issues and drive improvements.

Skills

Cloud architecture expertise

System design

Debugging and problem-solving

AI-driven tools proficiency

Team mentoring

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science

Tools

Java

Spring Boot

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Redis

MongoDB

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Kafka

GCP PubSub

Istio

Linkerd

Job description

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AirAsia MOVE is a leading ASEAN‑focused budget travel OTA, part of the Capital A Group. We deliver customer‑centric travel solutions by combining innovation with operational excellence. Our goal is to create seamless, reliable, and delightful journeys for travelers across the region.

About the Role

We are seeking a hands‑on Staff Engineer to drive technical excellence and own the technology roadmap for key OTA services. In this role, you will be responsible for designing and operating highly available, scalable systems, mentoring developers, and collaborating closely with engineering leadership. You will help shape team culture, make architectural trade‑offs with confidence, and solve complex problems under tight deadlines.

Core Competence

• Deep cloud, system design, and architecture expertise.
• Cross‑functional system knowledge for resilience, availability, and scale.
• Confident in architectural and design trade‑offs.
• Strong debugging and problem‑solving skills.
• Ability to own and evolve the team’s technical roadmap.
• Proficiency in AI‑driven tools and processes to boost developer productivity and automation.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide architectural oversight and review designs for services, APIs, and data flows.
• Make informed trade‑offs between performance, reliability, and speed to market.
• Define and enforce coding standards, design patterns, and best practices.
• Mentor engineers on system design, code quality, and operational excellence.
• Design and implement robust, scalable, and secure backend services (Java, Spring Boot, or similar).
• Ensure services meet high availability, fault tolerance, and low‑latency requirements.
• Embed observability tools with OpenTelemetry into platform design.
• Drive platform engineering, developer productivity tools, CI/CD pipelines, and service mesh implementations.
• Experience in defining standards for coding, reliability, scalability, AI developer productivity.
• Ensure services adhere to security, compliance, and data‑privacy standards.
• Troubleshoot production issues, conduct root cause analysis, and drive continuous improvements.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 8–14 years of backend development experience, with at least 3 years in a leadership or senior architect role.
• Strong experience in building backend services (Java, Spring Boot, or Nodejs) and experience with full stack is a plus.
• Strong knowledge of relational (MySQL/PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (Redis, MongoDB) databases.
• Working knowledge of frontend ecosystems (Native, React, React Native, Flutter) to ensure seamless backend‑UI integration.
• Strong expertise with authentication protocols (OAuth2, OIDC) and event systems (Kafka, GCP PubSub).
• Experience with service mesh (Istio, Linkerd) and cloud‑native API gateway architectures.
• Hands‑on with observability tooling: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, ELK, or similar.
• Excellent debugging skills and the ability to diagnose complex distributed system issues.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and grow engineering teams.
• Experience working with e‑commerce and travel domain is a plus.
• Startup experience is strongly preferred.

Why Join AirAsia MOVE?

• Lead the architecture and scaling of a high‑traffic travel platform.
• Work in a fast‑paced environment where your technical decisions have direct impact.
• Collaborate with a diverse, high‑performing team passionate about travel and technology.
• Competitive compensation and career‑development opportunities.