Engineering Manager - Backend & Platform

About the role

AirAsia MOVE, a budget travel platform owned by Capital A, is looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager in Kuala Lumpur. The role drives technical excellence and owns the technology roadmap for key OTA services, designing and operating highly available, scalable systems, mentoring developers and collaborating with engineering leadership.

Key responsibilities

• Provide architectural oversight and review designs for services, APIs and data flows, making trade-offs between performance, reliability and speed to market.
• Define and enforce coding standards, design patterns and best practices, and mentor engineers on system design, code quality and operational excellence.
• Design and implement robust, scalable, secure backend services (Java, Spring Boot or similar) that meet high availability, fault tolerance and low-latency requirements.
• Embed observability tools such as OpenTelemetry and drive platform engineering, CI/CD pipelines, developer productivity tools and service mesh implementations.
• Ensure services follow security, compliance and data-privacy standards, troubleshoot production issues, run root cause analysis and drive continuous improvement.

Required profile

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field.
• 8-14 years of backend development experience, including at least 3 years in a leadership or senior architect role.
• Proven ability to mentor and grow engineering teams; startup experience strongly preferred.
• Experience with e-commerce and travel domains is a plus.

Required skills

• Backend services in Java, Spring Boot or Node.js; full-stack experience is a plus.
• Relational (MySQL/PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (Redis, MongoDB) databases.
• Frontend ecosystems (React, React Native, Flutter) and authentication protocols (OAuth2, OIDC); Kafka, GCP PubSub.
• Service mesh (Istio, Linkerd) and cloud-native API gateways.
• Observability tooling such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, ELK.

What we offer

• High ownership with the freedom to influence mobile architecture and direction.
• Collaboration with designers, product owners and senior tech leads.
• Travel perks and exposure to cross-regional product teams within Capital A.