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Job Description Job Title: Principal Engineer Location: Kuala Lumpur / Bangalore 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. About the Role As a Principal Engineer, you will drive the architectural strategy, scalability, and resilience of MOVE’s frontend and backend services. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to design distributed systems and high-performance frontend platforms, evolve our microservices infrastructure, and mentor senior engineers across all engineering squads. Your work will directly impact millions of users as we scale regionally. 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 • 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. 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. • Strong expertise with authentication protocols (OAuth2, OIDC) and event systems (Kafka, GCP PubSub). • Working knowledge of frontend ecosystems (Native, React, React Native, Flutter) to ensure seamless backend–UI integration. • 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. 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.