Principal Engineer - Backend

Job description

Job Description Job Title: Engineering Manager Location: Kuala Lumpur About AirAsia MOVE AirAsia MOVE is a dynamic ASEAN-focused budget travel platform redefining how people experience and book travel. As part of Capital A, we’re building products that span flights, hotels, e-hailing, experiences, payments, and more—powered by a tech-first mindset and a relentless focus on customer experience. Join us in shaping the digital future of travel across the region. About the Role We are seeking a hands-on Engineering Manager 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? Build the next-generation mobile experience for one of ASEAN’s most loved travel brands. High ownership environment with the freedom to influence mobile architecture and direction. Collaborate with passionate designers, product owners, and senior tech leads. Enjoy travel perks and exposure to cross-regional product teams within Capital A.