Manager, Backend Engineering

About Traveloka

Traveloka is Southeast Asia's leading travel and lifestyle super-app. We connect tens of millions of travellers across the region with flights, hotels, experiences, financial services, and more — all from a single platform. Since our founding in 2012, we have expanded to eleven markets, processed billions of dollars in transactions, and built one of the most recognised consumer brands in the region.

Job Description

We move fast because the region demands it. Southeast Asia is young, mobile‑first, and growing faster than almost anywhere else on earth. We are not transplanting a Western playbook — we are writing a new one, from scratch, for a market that does not look like anywhere else — and we are calling for people who want to be part of that.

About The Team

Ground Transport Engineering builds the systems that connect the last mile of travel — airport transfers, intercity buses, trains, and car rentals across Southeast Asia. Behind every booking you make is a wide surface area of product types, supply integrations, and real‑time availability, and our backend, frontend, and mobile engineers own it end to end. This is a high‑growth business where the technical problems are messy, regional, and far from solved.

You will ship to millions of travellers across 11 markets and watch your work move the metric within the week. We run lean, with high accountability and short paths from idea to production — no layers between you and impact. If you want to engineer travel infrastructure that genuinely has no Western blueprint, you will build it here.

About The Job

As a Manager, Backend Engineering on Traveloka's Ground Transport team, you own the delivery and the people of a small backend team — staying hands‑on enough that your direction holds in review, while taking on the first layer of people leadership.

• Own your team's delivery outcomes — roadmap commitments, quality, and reliability of the accommodation backend services you steward
• Set the architectural direction for the team's work and hold the quality bar through hands‑on review
• Own the on‑call and incident posture of your services, turning incidents into lasting reliability improvements, and run the team's engineering practice — review standards, on‑call health, incident follow‑through — without becoming the bottleneck
• Build a high‑performance team culture with clear expectations, fast feedback loops, and genuine accountability for results
• Translate roadmap into execution with clear ownership, and represent the team's priorities and push back on scope with evidence
• Partner with product and adjacent engineering leads to translate domain business goals into a credible, sequenced delivery plan
• Set how the team uses AI tools and hold the line on responsible, validated use

Job Requirements

• You have at least 8 years of backend engineering, including leading a small team — and you still write and review enough code that your team trusts your technical judgment.
• You have led the delivery of a backend project through a small team — you broke the work down, you sequenced it.
• You unblocked people, and you were accountable for it landing.
• You can own the delivery of a team's commitments end‑to‑end: you hold the plan, you see the risks early.
• You keep quality from slipping when the deadline tightens.
• You design and review at the system level — you can set the architectural direction for your team's services.
• You make the consistency, latency, and cost tradeoffs with them.
• You grow the engineers around you: you give specific, honest feedback, you create room for people to stretch, and you have helped someone level up because of how you coached them.
• You have a degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent depth from real‑world engineering.
• You handle the first layer of people responsibility: regular 1:1s, goal-setting.
• You surface performance or growth conversations honestly rather than letting them drift.
• You set how your team uses AI tools in its workflow, and you can judge where they speed delivery and where they introduce risk worth guarding against.
• You communicate clearly with product and adjacent teams, and you can represent your team's priorities and push back on scope with evidence.