Staff Engineer

Job Description

Job Title: Staff Engineer
Location: Kuala Lumpur

About AirAsia MOVE
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 coding, 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

Technical Leadership

• 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

System Design & Development

• 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

• Troubleshoot production issues, conduct root cause analysis, and drive continuous improvements

• Own end-to-end delivery: from requirements gathering to deployment, monitoring, and support

Collaboration & Roadmap Ownership

• Work closely with Product, DevOps, QA, and other stakeholders to align on priorities and delivery timelines

• Translate business requirements into technical solutions and present them to non-technical audiences

• Own the team’s technology roadmap: evaluate new tools, platforms, and architectural patterns

• Foster a culture of experimentation, documentation, and knowledge sharing

Operational Excellence

• Collaborate with SRE/DevOps to establish effective monitoring, alerting, and Devsecops strategies

• Ensure services adhere to security, compliance, and data-privacy standards

• Drive capacity planning, performance tuning, and cost-optimization initiatives

Required Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field

• 8+ years of backend development experience, with at least 3 years in a leadership or senior architect role

• Expert in Java (Spring Boot) or equivalent backend stacks (Nodejs, Go, Python, etc.)

• Proven track record of designing and operating microservices at scale (REST APIs, event-driven architectures)

• Strong understanding of relational (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (Redis, MongoDB) databases

• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)

• Excellent debugging skills and the ability to diagnose complex distributed system issues

• Demonstrated ability to mentor and grow engineering teams

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with messaging systems (Kafka, gcp pubsub) and caching strategies

• Familiarity with observability tools esp. with OpenTelemetry 

• Experience with DevSecOps practices: CI/CD pipelines, code scanning, secret management, SCA, SAST, DAST among others

• Quality Automation for all critical applications

• Understanding of frontend technologies (React, ReactNative, Flutter) to align backend design with UI requirements

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