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

In this role, you will be the driving force behind technical quality and cross-team coherence, ensuring our systems are robust, scalable, and delightful for our customers. Here is how you will make a profound impact:

• Elevate Software Quality through Collaboration: You will be a vital connector, collaborating extensively with cross-functional Product, Design, and Technology teams. Your work ensures that we consistently create high-quality, resilient software that directly translates into an exceptional customer experience.
• Lead Complex, Multi-Team Solutions: You will regularly take the technical lead in designing and delivering solutions that are not confined to a single team or component. This involves a deep, architectural understanding of integration points, cross-system dependencies, and a clear-eyed assessment of technical and business trade-offs. Your focus goes beyond the feature level to fundamentally improve how interconnected systems function across the entire domain.
• Champion Code and Deployment Excellence: You are committed to producing clean, consistent, and meticulously organized solutions that rigorously adhere to our established technology standards and best practices. You will maintain a high-velocity development cycle, regularly deploying your changes to production with confidence and a focus on reliability.
• Proactive System Health and Architectural Stewardship: You possess a keen, forward-looking perspective, proactively identifying and surfacing systemic issues that affect multiple teams. This includes hidden technical debt, critical scalability bottlenecks, reliability risks, and architectural inconsistencies. You will not just report these issues but will drive the creation and execution of practical, high-impact plans to address them at their root.
• Unblock and Empower Engineering Teams: You act as a force multiplier, providing essential technical guidance, foundational frameworks, and critical system context to unblock other teams. Crucially, you achieve this without becoming a central point of failure or a bottleneck, empowering teams to move forward autonomously.
• Strategic Risk Mitigation and Future-Proofing: You constantly look ahead to anticipate potential scaling challenges, looming reliability threats, or architectural limitations. You execute early, strategic actions to mitigate these risks well before they can disrupt delivery timelines or negatively impact the customer experience.
• Mentorship, Coaching, and Multiplied Impact: Your influence extends far beyond your direct code output. You actively mentor and coach engineers across the organization, with a specific focus on developing Senior Engineers. You guide their growth in sophisticated system thinking, sound technical judgment, and confident delivery. Your success is measured by the increased capability and output of the engineers around you.

Experience & Capabilities: The Foundation for Impact

Your proven expertise and capabilities will be the engine for your success in this role:

• System-Level Technical Leadership: You possess a demonstrated and sustained ability to drive significant technical improvements and architectural changes that span multiple teams. You excel at identifying complex, system-level trade-offs and skillfully fostering a deep, cross-functional understanding of intricate dependencies across the organization.
• End-to-End Solution Ownership: You are proficient in owning and directing multi-team solutions, expertly navigating the delicate balance between achieving business needs, managing technical debt, and ensuring long-term scalability. You are a champion for consistency, ensuring the rigorous and secure adoption of modern design and coding practices across your domain.
• Mastery of Execution at Scale: You are an expert at driving and enforcing execution for high-volume, complex systems. This includes the ability to efficiently remove cross-team dependencies and blockers, while enforcing the highest standards for observability, code quality, and reliable, high-integrity delivery pipelines.
• Driving Modern Development Practices: You are a passionate champion for adopting modern engineering methodologies, including emergent design principles, robust Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and comprehensive automation strategies. Furthermore, you actively enhance and refine existing toolchains to dramatically boost developer productivity and experience.
• Strategic Data-Driven & AI Adoption: You have a verifiable track record of establishing and embedding data-driven practices—such as implementing error budgets, tracking granular performance metrics, and defining SLAs—to measure and improve engineering health. You are also a strategic driver for the organization-wide adoption of AI-enabled workflows and intelligent automation to create new efficiencies.
• Deep and Pragmatic Technical Breadth: You possess deep expertise in working across multiple programming languages, frameworks, and architectural layers (from sophisticated front-end interfaces to robust back-end services). You bring a pragmatic willingness to engage with, refactor, and strategically improve legacy codebases, consistently elevating them to meet modern architectural and security standards.
• Consensus Building and Technical Communication: You are masterful at translating and communicating highly complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, from junior engineers to executive leadership. You excel at building genuine consensus across teams, successfully aligning them to adopt unified technical directions and organization-wide best practices.
• Dedicated Mentor and Coach: You are recognized for your ability to simultaneously guide the growth and career progression of multiple engineers. Peers seek you out for guidance in advanced system design, and you are known for facilitating effective knowledge sharing and applying high emotional intelligence in your coaching and feedback.
• Organizational and Delivery Resilience: You have the proven ability to help entire teams navigate periods of significant organizational change, shifting business priorities, and technical pivots while maintaining consistent, high-quality delivery and preserving strong team morale.
• Practical Planning and Execution: You are highly experienced in the planning, scoping, and execution of complex, large-scale projects, always applying a pragmatic lens to balance effort and impact. Prior exposure to and an understanding of the unique complexities of the travel technology industry will be a considerable advantage.

Technical Skills, Architecture & System Design Expertise

• Core Systems & Development
• Expert in enterprise stacks (Java, C#, .NET), mastering advanced performance tuning (GC, JIT).
• Designs high-throughput concurrent/asynchronous systems.
• Final escalation for low-level performance profiling and bottleneck elimination.
• Architectural Strategy
• Deep practical expertise in all major architecture patterns (Microservices, EDA, Serverless, SOA); selects the optimal one.
• Strategically negotiates trade-offs (Speed vs. Complexity, OpEx vs. Scale, Build vs. Buy).
• Aligns architecture with team structure (Conway's Law).
• Scalable & Resilient Systems
• Governs mandatory failure handling patterns (Bulkheads, Circuit Breakers, Retries).
• Establishes and validates geo-distributed Disaster Recovery (DR/BCP) strategies, ensuring aggressive RTO/RPO via mandatory "Game Day" testing.
• Manages distributed data consistency (Eventual via Sagas/CDC, or strong via Two-Phase Commit).
• Architectural Leadership & Governance
• Drives high-impact, cross-team architectural decisions.
• Establishes organization-wide standards, reference architectures, and security baselines.
• Secures stakeholder buy-in by articulating rationale, TCO, risks, and measurable benefits.
• Maintains authoritative "living" architectural documentation (e.g., ADRs).
• Domain Modeling & API Design
• Applies Domain-Driven Design (DDD) to define clean service boundaries, Bounded Contexts, and Aggregates.
• Designs, governs, and version-controls coherent public/private APIs (REST, gRPC, GraphQL), ensuring alignment and minimal coupling.
• Technology Evaluation & Strategy
• Methodically evaluates new technology based on data, focusing on TCO, OpEx, maintainability, security, and vendor viability.
• Leads creation of "golden path" reference implementations for safe, accelerated adoption.
• Technical Debt & Auditing
• Leads rigorous architectural reviews, code/design audits, and blameless post-mortems.
• Owns technical debt, identifying and prioritizing structural deficiencies.
• Translates analysis into pragmatic, tracked remediation plans integrated into roadmaps.

Benefits

At Serko we aim to create a place where people can come and do their best work.  This means you’ll be operating in an environment with great tools and support to enable you to perform at the highest level of your abilities, producing high-quality, and delivering innovative and efficient results. Our people are fully engaged, continuously improving, and encouraged to make an impact. Some of the benefits of working at Serko are: 

• A competitive base pay 

• Medical Benefits 

• Discretionary incentive plan based on individual and company performance 

• Focus on development: Access to a learning & development platform and opportunity for you to own your career pathways 

• Flexible work policy.