About this role
Job Description
Job Title: Principal Engineer – Backend
Location: Bangalore, India
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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.
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About the Role
As a Principal Engineer – Backend , you will drive the architectural strategy, scalability, and resilience of MOVE’s backend services. You'll collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to design distributed systems, evolve our microservices infrastructure, and mentor senior engineers across backend squads. Your work will directly impact millions of users as we scale regionally.
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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
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Key Responsibilities
- ## Own end-to-end architecture for complex, large-scale systems with long-term scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
- ## Make high-impact technical decisions and guide trade-offs across multiple domains and platforms.
- ## Set engineering standards, best practices, and governance models adopted across teams.
- ## Lead deep technical design reviews, critical incident postmortems, and complex problem investigations.
- ## Mentor senior engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning.
- ## Partner cross-functionally with product, security, infra, and business teams to align on strategic priorities.
- ## Evaluate emerging technologies and drive innovation aligned with organizational goals.
- ## Influence platform-wide modernization, observability, DevSecOps, and developer productivity initiatives.
- ## Serve as a trusted technical advisor to leadership, influencing product and business direction.
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Required Qualifications
- ## 10-18 years of backend engineering experience, with at least 2+ years in a principal-level or staff-level role.
- ## Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native architecture (GCP/AWS/Azure), microservices, and data platforms.
- ## Proven experience designing resilient, scalable, and secure platforms at enterprise scale.
- ## Strong leadership in system design, architecture reviews, and cross-team technical governance.
- ## Hands-on expertise in full-stack development, API design, data modeling, and infrastructure-as-code.
- ## Deep expertise in Java (Spring Boot) or similar backend languages (Go, Python, Node.js).
- ## 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).
- ## Strong understanding of security principles, regulatory compliance, and cost optimization.
- ## Demonstrated thought leadership via papers, talks, patents, or open-source contributions
- ## Ability to simplify complex problems, drive clarity, and align diverse stakeholders in technical direction.
- ## Excellent debugging and system design skills in distributed environments.
- ## Experience implementing benchmarking services for throughput and quality automation for backend systems.
- ## Deep understanding with OpenTelemetry and observability best practices.
- ## Excellent communication, influencing, and stakeholder management skills.
- ## Startup experience is strongly preferred
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Why Join AirAsia MOVE?
- ## Build impactful products used by millions across ASEAN.
- ## Work with seasoned engineers and cross-functional experts.
- ## Flat structure, fast decisions, no bureaucracy.
- ## High trust, high responsibility culture with space to lead and innovate.
- ## Employee travel perks and regional exposure.
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