Principal Engineer - Platform Backend

About the role

AirAsia MOVE, a budget travel platform focused on ASEAN and part of Capital A, is hiring a Principal Engineer in Kuala Lumpur. The role drives the architectural strategy, scalability and resilience of the backend services, works with cross-functional teams to design distributed systems and evolve the microservices infrastructure, and mentors senior engineers across backend squads.

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 domains and platforms.
• Set engineering standards, best practices and governance models adopted across teams.
• Lead technical design reviews, incident postmortems and complex problem investigations.
• Mentor senior engineers and foster technical excellence and continuous learning.
• Partner with product, security, infrastructure and business teams on strategic priorities.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and influence platform modernization, observability, DevSecOps and developer productivity.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to leadership.

Required profile

• 10-18 years of backend engineering experience, including at least 2 years in a principal-level or staff-level role.
• Proven experience designing resilient, scalable and secure platforms at enterprise scale.
• Leadership in system design, architecture reviews and cross-team technical governance.
• Full-stack development, API design, data modeling and infrastructure-as-code.
• Thought leadership shown through papers, talks, patents or open-source contributions.
• Startup experience strongly preferred; excellent communication and stakeholder management.

Required skills

• Java (Spring Boot) or Go, Python or Node.js.
• Cloud-native architecture (GCP/AWS/Azure), microservices and data platforms.
• Relational (MySQL/PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (Redis, MongoDB) databases.
• Authentication (OAuth2, OIDC) and event systems (Kafka, GCP PubSub).
• Frontend ecosystems (React, React Native, Flutter) and OpenTelemetry observability.
• Benchmarking services for throughput and quality automation.

What we offer

• Flat structure, fast decisions and no bureaucracy.
• High-trust, high-responsibility culture with space to lead and innovate.
• Employee travel perks and regional exposure.