Principal Software Development Engineer

Principal Software Development Engineer  

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 the architectural vision, design, and delivery of complex software solutions across multiple technical domains. 

• Drive system design, API development, and data modeling to ensure secure, maintainable, and high-performing platforms. 

• Guide and mentor engineering teams, fostering technical excellence and innovation across projects and domains. 

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

• Optimize operational excellence by implementing robust software development practices and scalable engineering processes. 

• Collaborate with cross-functional partners to deliver resilient, business-aligned technology solutions and support continuous improvement. 

Minimum Qualifications: 

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

• 12+ years of relevant professional experience. 

• Demonstrated expertise in large-scale system architecture, technical decision making, and delivery of complex multi-domain solutions. 

• Proven track record in designing and operating secure, high-quality, and scalable software systems. 

• Familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real world products. 

Preferred Qualifications: 

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

• Demonstrated success guiding engineering organizations through periods of significant growth, change, or complexity. 

• Expertise in full stack engineering with 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. 

• Experience building and deploying neural search and embedding-based retrieval systems, including vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS), semantic search architectures, and large-scale similarity search at scale with sub-100ms latency requirements. 

• Strong experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) for production ML systems, including designing and deploying ranking models, personalization engines, and real-time inference pipelines with knowledge of model serving patterns (e.g., TorchServe, TensorFlow Serving, BentoML) and online/offline evaluation frameworks.