Principal Engineer, Back End (Bangkok based, Relocation provided)

About Agoda

At Agoda, we bridge the world through travel. Our story began in 2005, when two lifelong friends and entrepreneurs, driven by their passion for travel, launched Agoda to make it easier for everyone to explore the world.

Today, we are part of Booking Holdings [NASDAQ: BKNG], with a diverse team of over 7,000 people from 90 countries, working together in offices around the globe. Every day, we connect people to destinations and experiences, with our great deals across our millions of hotels and holiday properties, flights, and experiences worldwide.

No two days are the same at Agoda. Data and technology are at the heart of our culture, fueling our curiosity and innovation. If you’re ready to begin your best journey and help build travel for the world, join us.

Get to Know our Team

In Agoda’s Back End Engineering department, we build the scalable, fault-tolerant systems and APIs that host our core business logic. Our systems cover all major areas of our business: inventory and pricing, product information, customer data, communications, partner data, booking systems, payments, and more. These mission-critical systems change frequently with dozens of releases per day, so we must employ state-of-the-art CI/CD and testing techniques in order to make sure everything works without any downtime. We also ensure that our systems are self-healing, responding gracefully to extreme loads or unexpected input. In order to accomplish this, we use state-of-the-art languages like Scala and Go, data technologies like Kafka and Aerospike, and agile development practices. Most importantly though, we hire great people from all around the world and empower them to be successful. Whether it’s building new projects like Flights and Packages or reimagining our existing business, you’ll make a big impact as part of the Back End Engineering team.

The Opportunity

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to drive innovation across our AI-powered data experience and platform infrastructure.

This role combines leading the development of AI-powered data querying — enabling users to ask business questions in natural language and receive actionable insights — while shaping the evolution of our data quality tools, and analytical engines such as StarRocks.

As a senior technical leader, you will operate across AI, data infrastructure, and reliability domains, driving high-impact initiatives and serving as a key technical authority across the organization.

This position is based in Bangkok, Thailand. (Relocation support is provided)

In this Role, you'll get to:

• Lead the development of AI-powered data querying solutions, enabling users to ask business questions in natural language and receive actionable insights.
• Architect and develop scalable data quality tools and frameworks to ensure reliable and trustworthy data.
• Act as a hands-on technical leader, tackling complex challenges across AI query engines, data quality systems, and analytical engines.
• Collaborate with TPMs and stakeholders to define and drive the technical vision and roadmap for AI-driven querying, query engines, and data quality tools.
• Mentor engineers and raise standards across data quality & governance tools, query engines, and the broader data platform.

What you'll Need to Succeed:

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, or related fields
• Strong hands-on experience with:
• SQL and large-scale data systems
• Modern analytical databases / data warehouses (e.g., StarRocks, Snowflake, BigQuery, ClickHouse)
• Backend development (e.g., Python, Java, Scala or similar)
• Experience building or working with:
• AI/LLM-based applications (e.g., text-to-SQL, conversational interfaces, cursor, copilots)
• Data platforms or analytical infrastructure at scale
• Strong understanding of data modeling, query execution, and performance optimization
• Proven ability to lead cross-team, high-impact technical initiatives
• Ability to navigate between deep hands-on work and strategic technical leadership
• Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

It's Great if you have:

• Experience with text-to-SQL systems or AI-driven data interfaces
• Experience implementing or scaling analytical engines such as StarRocks
• Background in data observability, quality, or governance frameworks
• Experience with tools like dbt, Airflow, Spark, or similar

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