Working at Agoda
Headquartered in Asia, Agoda is one of the world’s largest online travel accommodation platforms. I joined Agoda back in 2019 and I would like to share the journey so far in the company. Also, I get a lot of queries about what it’s like to work at Agoda which motivated me to write this blog.
Disclaimer: This is solely my personal view of the company.
How did I end up in Agoda?
While working at Amazon, I started losing interest in the product and my growth was stagnant. So I decided it was better to leave and join a mid-sized company that will give me more exposure. I applied to several companies in Europe and Asia and one of them was Agoda. Honestly, I didn’t go through their company profile until I got their screening interview.
Interviews
I have written a detailed blog on my interview experience here:
What do I love About Agoda?
NOTE: I work at their Bangkok office, which is where most of the tech teams are located. Agoda has several other smaller offices in Singapore, Tel Aviv, Gurgaon, etc.
Diversity and Inclusion
The teams here have a very diverse crowd which consists of people from more than 90 nationalities with a well-balanced gender representation. Agoda seems to hire more expats to keep their diversity intact. I feel it’s a fulfilling and rewarding professional experience to work closely with people from different cultures and backgrounds.
Work-Life Balance
Work hours are generally 8 hrs typically 10 AM to 6 PM, no hard rules. I usually log in at 9 AM and try to wrap up by 6 PM. Nobody will disturb you after work hours although on-calls might have a different story. Managers usually don’t entertain teams to put in more than 8 hrs a day. I had situations where I worked on weekends for some urgent releases but this is not a usual thing and comes with compensating off days.
The work-from-home culture was almost absent till covid happened. They prefer to have teams in the office, but things have started to change now. Due to the covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been working from home for more than a year but I enjoy working from the office.
Engineering Teams & Quality of Work
Almost all the engineering teams follow agile scrum practices and also I am a scrum master for my current team which allows me to work closely with product managers and the team. Generally based on the scope of the work, there are 2 types of teams:
- Tech Teams: These are teams that own the core microservices like the pricing, booking, authentication, search, etc. These systems need to be highly performant, always available, scalable, and maintainable. They are also responsible for the CI/CD pipelines, deployments, and server infrastructure. Most of these teams would only have development managers and engineers. If you want to solve real distributed system challenges, this would be the right place for you!
- Product Teams: These are cross-functional teams that own a particular product. Almost all product teams have a dedicated product manager, a development manager, and engineers. Most of the time you would be spending time in design discussions with other teams to build the product features. One unique thing I found in Agoda is that if you want a feature in another system, you will have to go build that feature in that system most of the time. This gives the engineers a wholesome view of architecture and the opportunity to get their hands on systems that are mostly written in different technology stacks. Also, product teams might own small-scale services or user interfaces that are used by internal customers.
Till now I’ve been working in product teams only and I have learned several tech stacks like scala used mainly in the backend services, .NET used for frontend gateway services, typescript for the react frontend, Docker, and Kubernetes for CI/CD, etc. I have contributed to almost all systems like supply, hotel search, pricing, booking, post-booking, frontend websites, etc.
Organization Structure & Leadership
I’ve always felt Agoda is a very flat organization and the senior leadership is very open. Even being a junior engineer, you’d still have the opportunity to make huge impacts. Since the company is mid-sized, there are more chances you might interact with director-level people, and your work gets heard by a higher audience. Most of the engineering managers and directors are technically strong folks, making it very easy to connect with them. I’ve had 3 managers so far and all of them had given me the space to grow with almost zero micromanagement.
Attending the monthly town hall meetings is something I enjoy. This is where I get to see the senior leadership talk about company prospects followed by Q&A sessions with some no-bullshit answers. Even though I’ve only worked in a handful of companies, Agoda is the only place so far where I sincerely try to keep myself available for town hall meetings.
Data-Driven Company
Agoda has a strong focus on data and there is a dedicated org that builds data pipelines, experiment platforms, and data visualization tools. Being from a product team, data is very important to prove if what we built has a customer impact. A huge number of A/B tests are running every day spanned across several systems and the data teams have built the necessary tools to measure their impacts.
Bangkok Office
I work at their Bangkok office which is worth mentioning. It’s located inside the Central World complex which is ranked as the eleventh largest shopping mall in the world and it’s pretty accessible by all public transport. Thailand is also an amazing place to live and more about that can be found here:
In early 2022, I’ve already completed 2 years here and still don’t have plans for my next move. I’ve grown a lot since the day I joined and I’ve got two promotions in these periods. I am still excited about the product and the company's vision, and I’m eagerly waiting for travel to come back in 2022.
FAQs
- How much should I expect in terms of pay if I’m getting XYZ $ in my current job?
Ans: This is a pretty tricky question to answer and I can’t give an actual figure since it keeps changing based on your current CTC, market trends, your interview performance, experience, etc. Also, since most of you are going to be expat hires, it can be even harder with living costs, the standard of living, exchange rates, etc etc. I’ve created an overly simplified excel sheet with macros that might be able to guide you into the right thought process: here.
