Engineering Manager, Back End - Generative Ai (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: At Agoda, our Backend Engineering team builds the scalable, fault-tolerant systems and APIs that power our global travel platform across pricing, inventory, customer data, bookings, payments, and more. We operate high-scale, mission-critical services with frequent releases, using modern engineering practices in CI/CD, automated testing, resilience, and observability.

Our engineers work on complex distributed systems using technologies such as Scala, Go, Kafka, and Aerospike — while also exploring how Generative AI can accelerate engineering productivity, improve developer workflows, and unlock new product innovation. This is an exciting opportunity to join a team solving large-scale engineering challenges while helping shape how AI is applied to the future of travel technology.

The Opportunity: The Engineering Manager role at Agoda is one of the most significant and challenging roles at the company. We are looking for a technically strong and people-focused leader to join our Generative AI engineering organization.

You will lead backend engineering teams building scalable AI-enabled platforms and solutions that support Agoda’s products, engineering teams, and business functions. This role offers the opportunity to shape how Generative AI is adopted across the organization while establishing strong standards for engineering quality, reliability, security, and operational excellence.

In this Role, you’ll get to:

• Lead the end-to-end execution of backend and platform initiatives related to Generative AI.
• Define and evolve scalable, reliable, and secure backend systems that support AI-enabled experiences and internal engineering workflows.
• Drive technical strategy, system architecture, engineering standards, and long-term platform scalability.
• Remain hands-on by writing and reviewing code, participating in technical designs, and providing expert guidance to engineers.
• Own the operational performance of services, including reliability, availability, observability, scalability, and incident management.
• Promote a strong DevOps culture through automation, continuous delivery, and effective engineering practices.
• Partner with product, infrastructure, security, data, and engineering stakeholders to deliver high-impact solutions.
• Improve engineering productivity and enable teams to adopt new technologies effectively.
• Build a culture of ownership, collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Hire, coach, mentor, and develop engineers and emerging leaders.
• Establish clear goals and KPIs while making sound, data-driven decisions in an evolving technical landscape.

What you’ll Need to Succeed :

• Extensive experience building and operating backend systems, platforms, or large-scale services.
• Strong experience in systems architecture, particularly complex, scalable, and fault-tolerant distributed systems.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language, such as Java, Scala, C#, or an equivalent backend language.
• Demonstrated experience as a system owner with operational responsibility.
• Strong understanding of backend engineering fundamentals, including concurrency, threading, memory management, garbage collection, and performance optimization.
• Experience with DevOps practices, automation, CI/CD, and modern software delivery methodologies.
• Good understanding of application security and secure system design.
• Experience working in a successful agile engineering environment.
• Proven experience leading engineering teams with at least five direct reports.
• Strong people leadership, coaching, hiring, and performance management skills….