Lead Software Engineer, Backend - Service Mesh

Lead Software Engineer, Backend - Service Mesh

The Service Mesh Engineering team is a dynamic and experienced group responsible for developing our service mesh infrastructure, which forms the backbone of our microservice architecture. We help manage service-to-service connectivity, securing traffic, providing observability metrics, and enhancing service through proper use of Hystrix, timeouts, and rate limiting. Our team collaborates, using expertise in networking, infrastructure, microservices, and more.

Get to know the Role

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to drive the technical direction and execution of our service mesh platform — the foundation of service-to-service communication across our microservices architecture. You will be reporting to Senior Software Engineering Manager. You will own the architecture and roadmap of the platform, lead a team of engineers, and partner with stakeholders across the organisation to deliver a secure, observable, and scalable mesh. You will also expect to drive how the team leverages AI tooling to accelerate engineering velocity.

This is a senior technical leadership role with influence over platform direction, engineering practices, and how the team operates day-to-day.

This role is onsite based in our Petaling Jaya, Malaysia office.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

Technical leadership

• You will define and drive the multi-year technical strategy for the service mesh platform, including data plane and control plane evolution, capability roadmap, and migration paths from legacy systems.
• You will architect, design, and review complex changes to the mesh infrastructure (Istio, Envoy or equivalent), with a emphasis on reliability, scalability, and security.
• You will lead platform-wide concerns: traffic management, service discovery, mTLS and identity, observability, rate limiting, and cross-cluster communication.
• You will set engineering standards for the team — code quality, design review, testing, on-call practices, incident response, and post-mortem culture.
• You will ead architecture decisions that cross team boundaries, and represent the mesh platform in cross-organisation technical forums.

Execution and delivery

• You will break down ambiguous, multi-quarter initiatives into concrete deliverables and lead the team through execution.
• You will drive critical incident response and root-cause analysis for mesh-level outages; ensure long-term fixes land, not just mitigations.
• You will partner with product teams across the organisation to understand their service communication needs and translate those into platform capabilities.
• You will ensure: capacity planning, performance tuning, SLO definition, and proactive monitoring of mesh health.

People and team

• You will mentor junior and senior engineers on technical depth, system design, and platform thinking.
• You will conduct technical reviews, contribute to hiring, and help grow the team's overall capability.
• You will foster a culture of ownership, learning, and constructive technical debate.

AI adoption and engineering velocity

• You will drive the use of AI-assisted engineering tools within the team. These tools include coding assistants, code review, incident analysis, and documentation generation. You will also set the bar for how the team uses them.
• You will identify opportunities to apply AI in operational workflows — incident triage, log analysis, runbook automation, alert correlation, configuration generation — and lead the implementation of high-value applications.
• You will build internal patterns and shared infrastructure (prompts, MCP integrations, agents, evals) that improve team velocity in a measurable way.
• You will ttay current with the AI engineering landscape and translate emerging capabilities into improvements for the team and the platform.