Backend Engineer Manager

Agoda is hiring a Backend Engineer Manager to lead one or more engineering teams within its Back End Engineering department in Bangkok, with relocation support and visa sponsorship provided. The role combines hands-on technical work—writing and reviewing code, coaching engineers, and shaping system architecture—with people leadership, including developing engineers and hiring A-players. Systems are built using Scala, Go, Kafka, and Aerospike, supporting inventory, pricing, payments, and booking flows with dozens of releases per day.

The role requires strong proficiency in at least one of Java, Scala, or C#, experience designing complex scalable distributed systems, prior management of engineering teams with 5+ direct reports, and a background in agile, CI/CD-driven environments. Candidates should be comfortable making data-driven decisions, setting KPIs, and owning systems operationally.

Be hands on: write and review code, provide expert coaching and guidance to engineers

Have strong opinions on how systems should be architected, engineered, and maintained

Do full stack engineering across infrastructure, client side, back end, performance, and data

Develop people: inspire engineers to reach their potential and hire A-players from outside

Operate autonomously, making decisions, setting KPIs, and taking ownership

Extremely proficient in at least 1 programming language (Java, Scala, C#)

Strong experience in systems architecture for complex, scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems

Demonstrable experience as a system owner with operational responsibility

Proficient in lower level engineering (garbage collection, context switching, threading)

Must have run engineering teams before with 5+ direct reports and worked in a successful agile team