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 Platform architecture

Own the end-to-end architecture of the data platform — ingestion, storage, transformation, orchestration, and serving — and evolve it as the business scales

Architect scalable, secure, high-performance data systems across cloud environments (Azure, AWS, GCP), including event-driven and distributed designs

Lead build-versus-buy and technology selection decisions for core platform components, and author the design documentation that supports them

Pipeline engineering

Design and operate reliable, high-throughput batch and real-time pipelines processing [X TB/day] across [N] source systems

Define and enforce data modeling standards (dimensional, Data Vault, or medallion architecture) so that analytics and ML teams work from trusted, well-documented datasets

Lead initiatives across data segregation, de-duplication, cleanup, persistence, and lifecycle management

Governance, quality,



and security

Establish data quality, lineage, and observability practices, including SLAs, producer-consumer data contracts, and incident response for data issues

Implement and maintain data security controls: encryption standards, access control mechanisms, and compliance with applicable regulations

Reliability and cost

Optimize compute and storage for both performance and cost; own the platform's unit economics

Act as the escalation point for the platform's most complex production incidents

Technical leadership

Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design review, pairing, and code review

Translate architectural direction into implementation guidance teams can execute against

Technical Skills, Architecture & System Design Expertise 8+ years in software or data engineering, including at least 5 years focused on large-scale data systems

Expert-level SQL (including T-SQL) with strong query optimization skills, and proficiency in Python, Java, or Scala

Production experience with distributed processing frameworks (Spark, Flink, or equivalent)

Hands-on experience with a modern cloud data warehouse or lakehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift) and open table formats (Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi)

Strong command of data modeling, metadata management, and data cataloguing tools

Demonstrated ability to architect large-scale distributed systems, including event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka), distributed transactions, and reasoned trade-offs between availability and consistency

Experience implementing data security protocols, encryption standards, and access control mechanisms

Experience with orchestration frameworks (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform)

A track record of architecture you owned that others adopted — in production, at scale, under real constraints

Clear technical writing and the ability to make a technical case to both engineers and executives

Preferred qualifications Streaming infrastructure at scale (Kafka,



Kinesis, Pulsar) and change-data-capture patterns (Debezium)

Familiarity with data governance and compliance regimes ([GDPR / HIPAA / SOC 2 / DPDP Act])

Experience leading a platform migration or major re-architecture

Open-source contributions to data tooling

Java System Design & Architecture: Proven ability to architect large-scale distributed systems. Demonstrated expertise in building data-intensive, event-driven architectures (using tools like Kafka) and making educated tradeoffs regarding databases and infrastructure. Knowledge of distributed transactions and the ability to decide between availability versus consistency when building scalable solutions

Java & Collections: Deep expertise in core Java, JVM internals, multithreading, and a masterful understanding of the Java Collections Framework (knowing the internal workings, space/time complexities, and selection tradeoffs)

Good to have Microservices and Spring Boot expertise This role builds and operates JVM services alongside the data platform. The following depth is expected:

Spring & Spring Boot: Solid foundational knowledge of the Spring ecosystem, including a clear understanding of Spring Core (IoC, Dependency Injection, AOP, Security) and the building blocks of Spring Boot applications

Cloud-native service engineering

Design and deployment of high-performance APIs and microservices for cloud environments

Systems engineered for horizontal scaling, with high availability, fault tolerance, and graceful degradation under heavy load

Ongoing evaluation and tuning of deployed services for efficiency, reliability, and operational cost 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 prospect for you to own your career pathways Flexible work policy.

📌 Staff Software Engineer (Bengaluru)
🏢 Serko
📍 Bengaluru