Team Lead, AI & Automation

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. The Opportunity We are looking for a hands-on Team Lead, AI & Automation to join Finance Data & Automation (FDA). You will own a major automation workstream for Finance and FinTech teams across AR/Collections, AP, Treasury, Tax and Accounting, from discovery and design through build, deployment and production support. Our estate is moving from traditional RPA (SS&C Blue Prism) to code-first, agentic AI automation: Python services, data pipelines and LLM-based agents that are observable, testable and SOX-compliant. You will build alongside the team while setting technical direction, reviewing solutions and coaching engineers. Key Responsibilities • Own an automation workstream end to end: intake, prioritisation, solution design, delivery plan, and measurable outcomes (hours saved, error reduction, straight-through processing, cycle time). • Design, build, test and deploy automation using Python, APIs, SQL/data pipelines, workflow tools and RPA, picking the simplest approach that is reliable. • Lead agentic AI solutions such as document extraction, classification, dispute/exception handling and query triage. Use LLM tool calling, MCP-based integrations and agent frameworks, with human-in-the-loop checkpoints, guardrails and evaluation before anything touches a financial record. • Break down work, clarify ownership, and review designs and code across the team; set standards for testing, Git, code review and documentation. • Coach and support team members, including engineers moving from RPA to code and AI development. • Lead the migration of selected Blue Prism processes to code-based or agentic solutions without disrupting month-end and daily operations, while keeping existing bots stable. • Own monitoring, alerting, exception handling, run logs, runbooks and PDD/SDD documentation so solutions are supportable. • Build SOX/ITGC controls into each solution: change management, segregation of duties, least-privilege access and audit evidence. • Partner with Finance SMEs, process owners, FinSys and Engineering to scope requests, manage expectations and report progress and value to leadership. Requirements (must-have) • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. • 7+ years in software engineering, data engineering or intelligent automation, including production solutions you designed, delivered and supported end to end. • Experience leading a workstream or small team: planning work, reviewing solutions and coaching others. • Strong Python and SQL; experience with REST APIs/JSON, file/SFTP/email integrations and robust exception handling. • Fluency in agentic AI development: you have built LLM-based agents or automations using tool/function calling, MCP or similar tool integration, and at least one agent framework (e.g. LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, OpenAI Agents SDK). You also work productively with AI coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code or similar). • Discipl