Senior Data Platform Engineer — StarRocks

About Agoda

At Agoda, we bridge the world through travel. Our story began in 2005, when two lifelong friends and entrepreneurs, driven by their passion for travel, launched Agoda to make it easier for everyone to explore the world.  

 

Today, we are part of Booking Holdings [NASDAQ: BKNG], with a diverse team of over 7,000 people from 90 countries, working together in offices around the globe. Every day, we connect people to destinations and experiences, with our great deals across our millions of hotels and holiday properties, flights, and experiences worldwide.

 

No two days are the same at Agoda. Data and technology are at the heart of our culture, fueling our curiosity and innovation. If you’re ready to begin your best journey and help build travel for the world, join us.

 

Get To Know Our Team:

• The BI‑Infra organization owns Agoda’s core data warehouse architecture and operates the platforms that power analytics and BI across the company (e.g., SQL Server DW, SSAS, Vertica, StarRocks, Hadoop, Superset, Metabase, Tableau, Power BI Report Server). Our mission is to maximize system uptime and provide the best possible data and visualization experience to Agoda users. 

• The BI‑Infra DBA sub‑team focuses on database and BI platform reliability, performance, and cost efficiency — designing and operating scalable OLAP engines, tuning workloads, defining SLIs/SLOs, and partnering with BI and product teams to keep critical analytics systems healthy at scale. 

The Opportunity:

We are looking for a Senior/Staff Data Platform Engineer (BI Infra DBA) to lead the technical direction and operations of our analytics database and BI platforms (StarRocks as the primary analytics engine, Vertica, SQL Server DW, visualization backends, and related services). You will: 

• Own critical database and BI infrastructure end‑to‑end — architecture, performance, reliability, and security. 

• Lead multi‑team initiatives such as expanding StarRocks adoption and leading sql server datawarehouse migration, and major upgrades of visualization/BI tools. 

• Set engineering and operational standards for how we design, deploy, and monitor our BI data platforms, acting as the technical point of contact for BI‑Infra DBA 

What You’ll Do:

• Design and evolve Agoda’s BI data warehouse architecture across SQL Server DW, Vertica, StarRocks, and related services, focusing on availability, scalability, and cost efficiency. 

• Lead migration and modernization projects such as: 

  • Migrating workloads off MSSQL DW to more sustainable platforms (Production standby, data lake, StarRocks, etc.). 

  • Decommissioning legacy components as part of the long‑term DW strategy. 

• Define and implement data and query engine standards (indexing/partitioning patterns, materialized views, retention strategies, governance and access patterns) for BI platforms. 

• Define SLIs/SLOs for key services (StarRocks, Vertica, Tableau, Superset/Metabase, MSSQL DW) and ensure they are instrumented, monitored, and reviewed regularly. 

• Lead incident response for BI‑Infra DBA‑owned platforms: diagnose cross‑system issues (Query Engine - Database, VIz tools, Compute, Storage, Network), post‑mortem/root‑cause analysis, and follow‑up improvements. 

• Partner with BI‑Infra Ops/Dev/Viz and DBDev/DBOps on end‑to‑end reliability — from ingestion pipelines to visualization queries and user traffic patterns. 

• Perform deep query and workload tuning for high‑impact systems (e.g., finance, supply, whitelabel analytics, experimentation, DQ), reducing CPU/memory/IO and improving latency at scale. 

• Optimize resource consumption and license/capacity planning for Query Engine – Database and BI tools. 

• Collaborate with infra and product teams to evaluate and adopt new query engines / database technologies where they materially improve reliability, performance, or cost. 

• Own upgrade and patching strategies for database and BI stacks (OS, engine, drivers), using canary/blue‑green and rollback plans to minimize downtime. 

• Improve and extend CI/CD and deployment automation for database objects, jobs, and configuration (GitLab, AWX/Ansible, ArgoCD, etc.). 

• Build and maintain observability for BI-Infra DBA services (Grafana, Prometheus/SLO dashboards, alerting, Hedwig/NOC integrations) to detect and act on issues proactively. 

• Implement and maintain secure access patterns for DW and BI platforms (service accounts, RBAC, gMSA, password rotation, SSO/OKTA integration, DR strategy). 

• Partner with security and data governance teams to remediate vulnerabilities within SLAs, enforce data residency constraints, and ensure that upcoming workloads (e.g., whitelabels) are compliant by design. 

• Act as technical lead for BI‑Infra DBA initiatives, collaborating closely with BI‑Infra Ops/Dev/Viz, Database Operation/Development, Infra, and BI product teams. 

• Mentor and coach junior engineers on database performance, reliability, and platform engineering best practices; help raise the bar for design reviews, runbooks, and incident hygiene. 

• Contribute to knowledge sharing - Documents [Confluence, Agoda Internal Document Framework], internal talks, runbooks and help shape the technical roadmap for BI‑Infra DBA. 

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering / database engineering / DBA / platform engineering, with at least several years owning production OLAP/BI databases at scale. 

• Strong expertise with StarRocks (or similar modern MPP / columnar systems such as Vertica, ClickHouse, Presto/Trino, Druid, Doris, Impala) and solid SQL Server experience, including: 

  • Query execution internals and tuning (plans, statistics, partitioning, indexing, materialized views). 

  • Capacity planning, storage layout, and backup/restore. 

• Proven experience operating mission‑critical database or BI services in production: 

  • On‑call incident response, debugging across layers, and post‑mortem/root‑cause analysis. 

  • Designing and maintaining SLIs/SLOs, dashboards, and alerting for latency/availability/error budgets. 

• Solid understanding of data warehouse and ETL concepts (core DW tables like Fact-Dimension, MSSQL Replication/CDC, Staging patterns, data freshness & consistency, DQ processes). 

• Hands‑on experience with Linux and Windows in production environments (patching, hardening, troubleshooting resource issues). 

• Experience with infrastructure automation and CI/CD: 

  • Pipelines and deployment automation (GitLab CI, Ansible/AWX, ArgoCD, or similar). 

  • Git‑based workflows for database objects. 

• Strong communication and collaboration skills: 

  • Able to represent BI‑Infra DBA as the technical point of contact in cross‑team design and incident discussions at IC4 level. 

  • Comfortable explaining complex trade‑offs to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with StarRocks or similar modern OLAP engines, including: 

  • Designing schemas and materialized views for BI workloads. 

  • Operating clusters across multiple environments (DR, performance/capacity testing, cost tuning). 

• Hands‑on work with Superset, Metabase, Tableau, Power BI Report Server as data consumers — understanding how visualization patterns translate into backend workload and SLOs. 

• Exposure to Hadoop / Data Lakehouse ecosystems (e.g., Impala, Spark, Hive) and strategies for moving workloads from DW to lake/next‑gen engines. 

• Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Hedwig/NOC dashboards and alerting), SRE practices, and especially using AI/LLM-based tools to help with log analysis, anomaly detection, or auto-remediation for database/BI engines — this will be a strong plus. 

• Prior technical leadership at IC4 level or equivalent, driving multi‑quarter cross‑team projects and raising engineering standards for reliability, performance, and maintainability. 

 

 

Please review our Hiring Process Guidelines before your interview — click here to learn how interviewing at Agoda works.

 

 

Discover more about working at Agoda

• Agoda Careers https://careersatagoda.com
• Facebook https://www.facebook.com/agodacareers/
• LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/agoda
• YouTube https://www.youtube.com/agodalife

 

Equal Opportunity Employer 

At Agoda, we pride ourselves on being a company represented by people of all different backgrounds and orientations. We prioritize attracting diverse talent and cultivating an inclusive environment that encourages collaboration and innovation. Employment at Agoda is based solely on a person’s merit and qualifications. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, age, race, color, national origin, religion, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, citizenship, veteran or military status, and other legally protected characteristics.

We will keep your application on file so that we can consider you for future vacancies and you can always ask to have your details removed from the file. For more details please read our privacy policy.

Disclaimer

We do not accept any terms or conditions, nor do we recognize any agency’s representation of a candidate, from unsolicited third-party or agency submissions. If we receive unsolicited or speculative CVs, we reserve the right to contact and hire the candidate directly without any obligation to pay a recruitment fee.