Distinguished Software Development Engineer

Expedia Group brands power global travel for everyone, everywhere. We design cutting-edge tech to make travel smoother and more memorable, and we create groundbreaking solutions for our partners. Our diverse, vibrant, and welcoming community is essential in driving our success.

Why Join Us?

To shape the future of travel, people must come first. Guided by our Values and Leadership Agreements, we foster an open culture where everyone belongs, differences are celebrated and know that when one of us wins, we all win.

We provide a full benefits package, including exciting travel perks, generous time-off, parental leave, a flexible work model (with some pretty cool offices), and career development resources, all to fuel our employees' passion for travel and ensure a rewarding career journey. We’re building a more open world. Join us.

Distinguished Engineer, Multi-Product Shopping

Expedia Product & Technology builds 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 for the traveler and our partners that drive loyalty and customer satisfaction.   

Introduction to Team

We are the Multi-Product Shopping team responsible for the shopping traveler journey for Flights, Cars, Activities, and Packages on Brand Expedia across web, iOS, and Android platforms.  We aim to provide relevant products for our travelers to book and enjoy their complete trip with confidence ensuring Expedia is the one place you go to go places.  As the stewards and innovators of Expedia’s Air search platform, we own a dynamic platform with high processing requirements to serve relevant flight itineraries to our travelers with speed.

In this role, you will

• Define and lead the multi-year technical strategy for our Multi-Product Shopping team aligning to our traveler, partner, and business goals.
• Partner across multiple business and technical teams to define programs with large value for our Travelers and company and help distill them into 1–5-year plans.
• Own our data and machine learning strategy, ensuring that systems return relevant and personalized results and make automated decisions with high accuracy, creating a more delightful travel shopping experience.
• Drive clarity on trade-offs (e.g., caching vs. freshness, consistency vs. availability, heuristic vs. model-based decisions), making principled choices rooted in SLOs and measurable business impact.
• Lead by example thru cross-org architecture reviews, reference implementations, and design docs/RFCs that unblock multiple teams; provide deep mentorship to Principal and Senior Engineers.
• Champion observability and quality (SLOs, P95/P99 latency, canary and staged rollouts, automated regression detection, etc.) bringing a culture of excellence to our technology team.

Experience and Qualifications:

• Software engineer with 14+ years’ experience in designing and building large-scale, low-latency systems (tens of thousands of RPS, sub-second P95 goals).  You’ve been executing at the Principal Engineer level for 5+ years, leading innovative initiatives across a variety of business needs including information retrieval expertise.
• Strong ML engineering experience: comfortable collaborating with data scientists on problem framing and model-operational trade-offs.
• Influence at scale: history of cross-team technical leadership, setting engineering standards, mentoring senior and principal engineers, and driving complex programs to measurable outcomes.
• Excellent communicator: ability to tell a clear story on complex business and technical concepts, explain trade-offs to diverse audiences, and drive alignment across engineering, product, data science, and design.
• An innovator, with proven experience in developing new ideas in favor of your customers, and the ability to drive them to completion through a mix of personal effort and influencing other leaders above you or foreign to your space.

The total cash range for this position in Seattle is $296,000.00 to $414,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $473,500.00, which is the top of the range, based on ongoing, demonstrated, and sustained performance in the role.

Starting pay for this role will vary based on multiple factors, including location, available budget, and an individual’s knowledge, skills, and experience. Pay ranges may be modified in the future.

Expedia Group is proud to offer a wide range of benefits to support employees and their families, including medical/dental/vision, paid time off, and an Employee Assistance Program. To fuel each employee’s passion for travel, we offer a wellness & travel reimbursement, travel discounts, and an International Airlines Travel Agent (IATAN) membership. View our full list of benefits.

Accommodation requests

If you need assistance with any part of the application or recruiting process due to a disability, or other physical or mental health conditions, please reach out to our Recruiting Accommodations Team through the Accommodation Request.

We are proud to be named as a Best Place to Work on Glassdoor in 2024 and be recognized for award-winning culture by organizations like Forbes, TIME, Disability:IN, and others.

Expedia Group's family of brands includes: Brand Expedia®, Hotels.com®, Expedia® Partner Solutions, Vrbo®, trivago®, Orbitz®, Travelocity®, Hotwire®, Wotif®, ebookers®, CheapTickets®, Expedia Group™ Media Solutions, Expedia Local Expert®, CarRentals.com™, and Expedia Cruises™. © 2024 Expedia, Inc. All rights reserved. Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners. CST: 2029030-50

Employment opportunities and job offers at Expedia Group will always come from Expedia Group’s Talent Acquisition and hiring teams. Never provide sensitive, personal information to someone unless you’re confident who the recipient is. Expedia Group does not extend job offers via email or any other messaging tools to individuals with whom we have not made prior contact. Our email domain is @expediagroup.com. The official website to find and apply for job openings at Expedia Group is careers.expediagroup.com/jobs.

Expedia is committed to creating an inclusive work environment with a diverse workforce. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. This employer participates in E-Verify. The employer will provide the Social Security Administration (SSA) and, if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with information from each new employee's I-9 to confirm work authorization.