Staff Software Engineer

Serko is a cutting-edge tech platform in global business travel & expense technology. When you join Serko, you become part of a team of passionate travellers and technologists bringing people together, using the world’s leading business travel marketplace. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, we embrace the richness of diversity, showing up authentically to create a positive impact. There’s an exciting road ahead of us, where travel needs real, impactful change. With offices in New Zealand, Australia, North America, and China, we are thrilled to be expanding our global footprint, landing our new hub in Bengaluru, India. With rapid a growth plan in place for India, we’re hiring people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives to help us build a world-class team and product.

We are looking for a Staff Engineer who can blend technical depth with architectural vision, owning key systems and helping scale our platform as we grow. This role is pivotal in setting engineering standards, mentoring teams, and solving complex technical problems that impact millions of users in the travel-tech space.

You will work closely with cross-functional teams including product, design, QA, DevOps, and business stakeholders to design scalable, performant, and secure systems. This is a hands-on role with a strong focus on high-impact delivery and long-term technical strategy. 

Requirements Critical Tasks: Driving Technical Excellence and System-Wide Impact

Platform architecture

• Own the end-to-end architecture of the data platform — ingestion, storage, transformation, orchestration, and serving — and evolve it as the business scales
• Architect scalable, secure, high-performance data systems across cloud environments (Azure, AWS, GCP), including event-driven and distributed designs
• Lead build-versus-buy and technology selection decisions for core platform components, and author the design documentation that supports them

Pipeline engineering

• Design and operate reliable, high-throughput batch and real-time pipelines processing [X TB/day] across [N] source systems
• Define and enforce data modeling standards (dimensional, Data Vault, or medallion architecture) so that analytics and ML teams work from trusted, well-documented datasets
• Lead initiatives across data segregation, de-duplication, cleanup, persistence, and lifecycle management

Governance, quality, and security

• Establish data quality, lineage, and observability practices, including SLAs, producer-consumer data contracts, and incident response for data issues
• Implement and maintain data security controls: encryption standards, access control mechanisms, and compliance with applicable regulations

Reliability and cost

• Optimize compute and storage for both performance and cost; own the platform’s unit economics
• Act as the escalation point for the platform’s most complex production incidents

Technical leadership

• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design review, pairing, and code review
• Translate architectural direction into implementation guidance teams can execute against

Technical Skills, Architecture & System Design Expertise

• 8+ years in software or data engineering, including at least 5 years focused on large-scale data systems
• Expert-level SQL (including T-SQL) with strong query optimization skills, and proficiency in Python, Java, or Scala
• Production experience with distributed processing frameworks (Spark, Flink, or equivalent)
• Hands-on experience with a modern cloud data warehouse or lakehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift) and open table formats (Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi)
• Strong command of data modeling, metadata management, and data cataloguing tools
• Demonstrated ability to architect large-scale distributed systems, including event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka), distributed transactions, and reasoned trade-offs between availability and consistency
• Experience implementing data security protocols, encryption standards, and access control mechanisms
• Experience with orchestration frameworks (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform)
• A track record of architecture you owned that others adopted — in production, at scale, under real constraints
• Clear technical writing and the ability to make a technical case to both engineers and executives

Preferred qualifications

• Streaming infrastructure at scale (Kafka, Kinesis, Pu…