Distinguished Software Development Engineer

Expedia Group • Seattle, WA

1d • $296,000 - $414,500

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Benefits

• 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
• medical/dental/vision
• paid time off
• Employee Assistance Program
• wellness & travel reimbursement
• travel discounts
• International Airlines Travel Agent (IATAN) membership

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees