Software Development Engineer - BackEnd (Staff - Level 4) | Gurugram, IND
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 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.
What You will Do
- 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 your 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
What We're Looking For
Technical
- 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
Beyond the technical bar:
- A track record of taking ownership beyond your assigned tasks - initiatives you drove within your domain because you saw the need, not because you were told
- Comfort making decisions under ambiguity and owning the consequences, technical and business, 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, 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
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