Lead DevOps Engineer (Bangkok based, Relocation provided)

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.

The Data department oversees all Agoda's data-related requirements. Our goal is to enable and increase the use of data in the company through creative approaches and the implementation of powerful resources such as operational and analytical databases, queue systems, BI tools, and data science technology.

As a Lead Engineer (IC5), you will define the vision, architecture, and multi-year technical roadmap for our DevOps, automation, and platform engineering initiatives across the Data department. You are expected to operate as a subject matter expert and strategic technical leader, driving foundational improvements in infrastructure scalability, developer velocity, release engineering, and system reliability.

Responsibilities:

• Architect, scale, and lead the technical vision for hybrid infrastructure orchestration and automation across multi-cloud and on-premises environments, prioritizing resilience, operational efficiency, and cost optimization.
• Spearhead departmental adoption of DevOps, SRE, and GitOps methodologies, driving engineering transformation across development, platform, and QA teams to accelerate release velocity and minimize blast radius.
• Establish architectural standards and lead design reviews for large-scale automation frameworks, CI/CD platforms, and core infrastructure services to ensure robust security, high availability, and compliance.
• Define and execute the strategic technical roadmap for DevOps and developer productivity, identifying enterprise-wide bottlenecks and implementing automated solutions for highly ambiguous operational challenges.
• Diagnose and resolve systemic high-severity incidents, performance bottlenecks, and architectural trade-offs within complex distributed data pipelines and cloud infrastructure.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, cultivate a culture of engineering excellence, and raise the bar for technical design, code quality, and operational readiness.
• Evaluate, prototype, and implement emerging platform technologies, service meshes, and observability tooling to continuously advance our core operational infrastructure.
• Establish best-in-class operational playbooks, architecture patterns, and technical governance, influencing engineering standards across the wider organization.

Required Qualifications:

• Advanced software engineering mastery in one or more core languages (e.g., Golang, Python, Java) with a track record of architecting scalable, maintainable enterprise software systems.
• Proven track record as a lead contributor designing, optimizing, and modernizing the end-to-end Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and developer infrastructure for large-scale engineering organizations.
• Deep theoretical and practical foundation in distributed systems, network fundamentals, storage engine architecture, and high-concurrency systems design.
• Subject matter expertise in containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, custom operators), including multi-tenant cluster management, security hardening, and performance tuning at scale.
• Hands-on experience implementing enterprise Service Mesh and Service Discovery solutions (e.g., Istio, Linkerd, Consul, Envoy) for traffic management, mTLS security, and observability in large-scale cluster environments.
• Demonstrated technical leadership in driving major cross-functional infrastructure initiatives, aligning multiple technical teams, and delivering impactful outcomes on tight timelines.
• Exceptional troubleshooting capabilities with hands-on experience conducting deep-dive root cause analysis across distributed microservices, network fabrics, and kernel/OS-level issues.
• Proven capability to act as a technical mentor and force multiplier, establishing engineering guidelines, conducting RFC reviews, and growing technical talent.
• Deep expertise in SRE principles, continuous delivery patterns, Infrastructure as Code, and driving continuous improvement in system SLOs and error budgets.
• Superior technical communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to articulate architectural decisions clearly to executive leadership and technical staff alike.
• Deep expertise in architecting, scaling, and operating enterprise-grade relational and non-relational database infrastructure (e.g., PostgreSQL, MSSQL), encompassing schema optimization, zero-downtime migrations, failover strategies, and high-availability replication topologies.
• Proven leadership in designing and championing automated, zero-downtime continuous deployment platforms using GitOps methodologies (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux) and progressive release strategies (Canary, Blue/Green, automated rollback mechanisms).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Proven track record of architecting, deploying, and operating multi-region, high-throughput, and fault-tolerant distributed systems in mission-critical production environments.
• Extensive background in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and configuration management frameworks (e.g., Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, Pulumi) for declarative platform provisioning.
• Expertise in full-stack observability and SRE tooling (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, ELK/OpenSearch), including defining actionable metrics, tracing, and automated alerting.
• Experience with major cloud service providers (GCP, AWS, Azure), multi-cloud architectures, and financial operations (FinOps) to manage cloud utilization efficiently.