Principal Engineer

Job Description

Job Title: Principal Engineer
Location: Kuala Lumpur

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 – Platform, 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.

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.