Lead - Backend Engineer (Platform) - Spring/Java/Kotlin

OnArrival

OnArrival

Software Engineering

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Posted on May 1, 2026

OnArrival is building the core infrastructure layer for travel - powering flights, hotels, insurance, payments, and post-booking systems for large platforms.

We operate where:

  • APIs are unreliable
  • Failures cost money
  • Scale is not optional
What You’ll Do
  • Architect and build backend systems using Spring Boot + Kotlin/Java
  • Own platform-critical systems:
  • Booking lifecycle
  • Payments, refunds, reconciliation
  • Supplier orchestration (GDS, aggregators)
  • Design for:
  • Failures, retries, idempotency
  • High concurrency and race conditions
  • Build event-driven systems
  • Lead engineers via:
  • Code reviews (non-negotiable)
  • Architecture decisions
  • Mentorship
Required Technical Skills (Non-Negotiable)Core Backend
  • Strong hands-on experience with:
  • Java (8+) and/or Kotlin
  • Spring Boot (deep understanding, not just usage)
  • Solid grasp of:
  • Multithreading & concurrency
  • JVM internals (memory, GC basics, performance tuning)
  • Ability to design:
  • Clean, modular, scalable architectures
System Design & Distributed Systems
  • Strong experience in:
  • Designing distributed systems
  • Handling partial failures
  • Building fault-tolerant services
  • Must understand:
  • Idempotency
  • Circuit breakers, retries, backoff strategies
  • Eventual consistency
  • API rate limiting and throttling
APIs & Integrations
  • Experience building and consuming:
  • REST APIs (well-designed, versioned)
  • Experience handling:
  • Third-party APIs with:
  • Timeouts
  • Inconsistent schemas
  • Failure scenarios
  • Ability to design:
  • Resilient integration layers
Databases
  • Strong experience with:
  • MongoDB (or other NoSQL DBs)
  • Postgres (or any relational DB)
  • Must understand:
  • Data modeling (NoSQL vs relational trade-offs)
  • Indexing strategies
  • Query optimization
  • Transactions and consistency models
Event-Driven Architecture
  • Hands-on experience with:
  • Kafka (or similar message brokers)
  • Must understand:
  • Producers/consumers
  • Consumer groups
  • Message ordering and delivery guarantees
  • Dead-letter queues, retries
Scalability & Performance
  • Experience with:
  • High-throughput systems
  • Low-latency APIs
  • Ability to:
  • Identify bottlenecks
  • Optimize performance (DB, APIs, memory, CPU)
Observability & Debugging
  • Experience with:
  • Logging, monitoring, alerting systems
  • Ability to:
  • Debug production issues
  • Trace distributed system failures
Cloud & DevOps (Working Knowledge Required)
  • Familiarity with:
  • AWS (or any cloud platform)
  • Containerization (Docker)
  • Understanding of:
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • Deployment strategies
Code Quality & Engineering Practices
  • Strong emphasis on:
  • Code reviews (you will both give and receive)
  • Writing clean, maintainable code
  • Testing (unit/integration)
  • Experience with:
  • Git workflows (branching strategies, PR reviews)
Nice to Have (But Valuable)
  • Travel domain experience (GDS, booking systems)
  • Payments / fintech systems
  • Elasticsearch, ClickHouse
  • High-scale reconciliation systems
What This Role Actually Means
  • You own systems where bugs = real money loss
  • You design for failure before success
  • You don’t ship fragile systems
What Will NOT Work Here
  • Low ownership mindset
  • Avoiding production responsibility
  • Over-indexing on titles
  • Weak fundamentals hidden behind frameworks
What You Get
  • Real ownership
  • Real scale
  • Real impact
How to Apply

Send:

  • Resume / GitHub
  • A short write-up:
  • A system you built that handled scale or failure
  • What broke and how you fixed it