Director, Software Development Engineering - Air Shopping Platform

Director, Software Development Engineering – Air Shopping Platform 

Introduction to the team:  

Expedia Technology teams partner with our Product teams to create innovative products, services, and tools to deliver high-quality experiences for travelers, partners, and our employees. A singular technology platform powered by data and machine learning provides secure, differentiated, and personalized experiences that drive loyalty and traveler satisfaction.  

The Air Shopping Platform organization owns the end‑to‑end platform that powers Flight Search, Pricing, and Shopping across all Expedia Group points of sale, partnering closely with product, analytics, and connectivity teams. We are responsible for building a reliable, highly performant, scalable, and cost‑effective platform that delivers fast and relevant flight offers to the shopping experiences via Flight Search, Flight Details, and additional supporting APIs. The team is primarily accountable for driving flight transaction growth at Expedia Group across many, concurrent workstreams. 

In this role, you will: 

• Lead and inspire engineering teams to deliver scalable, resilient, and high-quality software solutions across multiple domains. 

• Define and drive the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for large-scale services and platforms, ensuring alignment with business goals. 

• Provide strategic oversight on system design, API development, and data modeling to enable secure, maintainable, and performant systems. 

• Foster a culture of operational excellence, continuous improvement, and collaboration across engineering, product, and cross-functional teams. 

• Safely integrate and operate AI/ML-enabled solutions that improve outcomes, championing best practices in responsible AI deployment. 

• Cultivate engineering talent, mentoring senior technical leaders and developing high-performing teams adaptable to evolving business needs. 

Minimum Qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field; or equivalent related professional experience. 

• 12+ years of relevant professional experience; with 5+ years managing teams. 

• Extensive engineering leadership experience managing multi-service or multi-domain teams delivering complex software solutions. 

• Demonstrated expertise in large-scale system design, architecture, and technical decision making. 

• Proven track record of integrating AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real world products. 

• Expert in classic and modern technical approaches to Information Retrieval in ecommerce Search and Recommendation platforms, including systems like Elasticsearch/Lucene and ML embeddings-based vector searches for semantic, free text search and recommendations systems. 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience driving architectural transformation and modernization initiatives for large, distributed systems. 

• Demonstrated success in leading engineering organizations through periods of high growth, change, or complexity. 

• Expertise in full stack engineering, with a proven ability to operate across multiple technical domains and platforms. 

• Track record of championing data-driven decision making and operational excellence for mission-critical systems. 

• Deep understanding of safely scaling AI/ML-enabled solutions, including risk mitigation and ethical considerations.