Principal Engineer

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.