Job Description
irAsia, Asia’s leading airline, was established with the dream of making flying possible for everyone. Since 2001, AirAsia has swiftly broken travel norms around the globe and has risen to become the world’s best. Driven by the Dare to Dream spirit, we pride ourselves on being the region’s largest low-cost carrier, serving 25 countries and over 160 destinations. AirAsia is ranked the world’s best low-cost airline 15 years in a row.
These are exciting times at AirAsia. As part of our continued evolution, we are expanding our digital technology capabilities to support airline distribution and travel commerce platforms at scale. You will join a small, senior core team responsible for designing, strengthening, and evolving mission-critical platform capabilities that operate at high transaction volumes and serve millions of users across multiple spanets.
This role is not purely advisory. We are looking for a Principal Software Architect who is hands-on, willing to write code when required, lead by example, and set engineering and architectural standards especially during the early phases of platform build, transition, and scale-up.
What Youll Do:
Design and develop: Work closely with cross-functional teams to design, develop, and deploy cutting-edge software solutions using technologies like Node.js, React.js, Angular, C (.NET framework), and Python & also integrating with AI Technologies.
Own platform architecture:
Design and evolve the end-to-end architecture for large-scale, distributed, transaction-heavy systems supporting airline distribution and travel commerce, and deploy cutting-edge software solutions using technologies like Node.js, React.js, Angular, C (.NET framework), and Python & also integrating with AI Technologies.
Be hands-on where it matters:
Actively design, prototype, and implement critical components to establish engineering standards, patterns, and best practices.
Lead technical direction:
Define system decomposition, service boundaries, API contracts, integration patterns, and data flows across the platform.
Build for scale and resilience:
Ensure systems are designed for high availability, performance, fault tolerance, and operational resilience in production environments.
Work closely with product and business stakeholders:
Translate complex business, operational, and commercial requirements into scalable technical solutions and implementation plans.
Champion engineering excellence:
Establish and enforce coding standards, architecture guidelines, review practices, and technical governance across internal teams and contractors.
Drive security and reliability by design:
Embed security, observability, monitoring, and failure-handling considerations into system design from day one.
Mentor and uplift teams:
Coach engineers, review designs and code, and help grow the technical maturity of the organization.
Support production when needed:
Provide technical leadership during critical incidents, root-cause analysis, and long-term architectural remediation.
What Youll Bring:
Technical & Architecture Experience
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 4–5 years in a senior architecture or technical leadership role.
Proven experience designing and building high-volume, transactional, distributed systems, ideally in travel, e-commerce, payments, or fintech domains.
Strong hands-on coding experience in modern backend technologies such as Java, Kotlin, Node.js, Go, C, or Python.
Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts, including asynchronous processing, idempotency, event-driven architectures, and eventual consistency.
Solid experience designing and consuming APIs and microservices, including integration with third-party systems.
Cloud & Platform Knowledge
Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, including compute, storage, messaging, and monitoring services.
Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift).
Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, and production deployment practices.
Experience with logging, monitoring, tracing, and performance management tools.
Professional & Leadership Skills
Strong analytical, problem-solving, and system-thinking skills.
Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Comfortable operating in ambiguous, evolving environments and making pragmatic trade-offs.
A mindset of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
Experience in airline systems, OTA platforms, GDS/NDC integrations, or travel technology is a strong advantage but not mandatory.
Why AirAsia?
Be part of a dynamic and innovative team thats revolutionizing the travel industry.
Enjoy a competitive salary and benefits package, including travel perks and opportunities for professional development.
Work in a vibrant and collaborative environment where you can make a real impact.
We are all different - one talent to another - that is how we rely on our differences. At AirAsia, you will be treated fairly and given all chances to be your best.We are committed to creating a diverse work environment and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.
Search Firm Representatives - AirAsia does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place will be deemed the sole property of our company. No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place.