Lead Software Engineer (Level 5) | BackEnd (Gurugram based)

About Agoda At Agoda, we bridge the world through travel. Our story began in 2005, when two lifelong friends and entrepreneurs, driven by their passion for travel, launched Agoda to make it easier for everyone to explore the world. Today, we are part of Booking Holdings [NASDAQ: BKNG], with a diverse team of over 7,000 people from 90 countries, working together in offices around the globe. Every day, we connect people to destinations and experiences, with our great deals across our millions of hotels and holiday properties, flights, and experiences worldwide. No two days are the same at Agoda. Data and technology are at the heart of our culture, fueling our curiosity and innovation. If you’re ready to begin your best journey and help build travel for the world, join us. About the Team At Agoda, our Backend Engineering organization builds high-scale, fault-tolerant distributed systems that power a global travel platform serving millions of users daily . Our systems span mission-critical domains including inventory, pricing, booking, payments, and customer/partner platforms . We operate with high availability, low latency, and zero-downtime expectations , leveraging technologies like Scala, Go, Java, Kotlin, Kafka, and Aerospike , supported by strong practices in CI/CD, automation, and observability, and engineering excellence. We ship fast — with dozens of daily releases — and design systems that are resilient, scalable, and continuously evolving. The Opportunity As a Lead Backend Engineer , you will own critical systems end-to-end , drive technical direction, and lead large initiatives. You will combine architecture, execution, and technical leadership to build scalable, reliable, and high-quality solutions that power Agoda's global platform. You will influence engineering decisions beyond your immediate team, mentor engineers, shape development practices, and help raise the organization’s technical bar. What You’ll Do Lead the architecture, design, and development of complex distributed systems at scale. Own the technical direction, delivery, and evolution of critical systems and platforms. Drive system design, API standards, software architecture, and engineering best practices across teams. Lead complex technical initiatives involving multiple services, teams, and stakeholders. Make key technical decisions, balancing business priorities with scalability, reliability, and maintainability goals. Remain an active contributor to production systems through regular coding, code reviews, system design, and technical problem-solving, balancing hands-on execution with leadership responsibilities. Mentor and coach engineers, helping raise technical capability, code quality, and engineering standards. Drive continuous improvements in development processes, engineering effectiveness, and agile ways of working. Align stakeholders and drive execution across cross-functional teams. Lead production stability, incident management, root-cause analysis, and long-term reliability improvements. Proactively identify opportunities to improve products, platforms, developer productivity, and customer experience What We’re Looking For 11+ Years experience building and operating large-scale backend systems in production environments. Proven experience delivering complex distributed systems at scale. Strong expertise in Java, Scala, Kotlin, or Go. Strong software architecture skills with a track record of driving architectural decisions within and across teams. Proven experience leading technical initiatives, projects, or engineering teams with end-to-end ownership. Recent and ongoing hands-on coding experience in production environments is required. Deep expertise in: Distributed systems and architecture API design and microservices Performance, scalability, and system reliability System design for high-throughput, highly available applications Nice to Have Experience building or owning large-scale platforms across multiple services or domains. Expe…