Principal AI Engineer- Customer Data Platform

Expedia Group • Seattle, WA

3d • $231,000 - $323,500

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. Introduction to the team Expedia Group is using AI to re-invent how we do engineering to deliver hyper-personalized traveler experiences. At the foundation of every successful AI initiative is data. The Customer Data Platform team is at the heart of Expedia Group's AI transformation, powering personalized experiences for over 700 million travelers annually across Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, and our entire brand portfolio. We're a dynamic group of engineers, data scientists, and product experts who are pioneering the use of generative AI and agentic systems to revolutionize how traveler data is processed, understood, and activated at a massive scale. We're not just building data pipelines – we're creating autonomous AI systems that understand traveler intent, predict needs, and enable hyper-personalized travel experiences in real-time. Our team culture celebrates innovation, where experimentation is encouraged, failures are learning opportunities, and breakthrough ideas come from everyone. You'll work alongside industry leaders who've built transformative systems at companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, tackling fascinating challenges like multi-modal travel planning, real-time personalization across 70+ countries and 30+ languages, and building AI that truly understands the nuances of human travel desires. The Customer Data Platform team at Expedia Group is looking for a proven, entrepreneurial, hands-on technical leader who will define and implement the vision for AI automated data engineering that will power EG’s hyper personalized traveler experiences. This is a rare opportunity to shape the future of AI in travel technology while having an immediate impact on how millions of people experience the joy of travel.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field; or Equivalent related professional experience
• 12+ years of relevant professional experience
• Extensive professional experience designing, building, and operating largescale, distributed backend or full stack services, including ownership of critical systems or platforms
• Demonstrated expertise in system design (including detailed component and low level design), API design, and data modeling for high throughput, low latency services
• Proven ability to own and drive technical direction and execution across multiple services or domains, influencing architecture and standards across teams, with strong software engineering skills in one or more modern programming languages

Nice To Haves

• Advanced degree in a relevant technical field (e.g., Computer Science, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics) with a focus on AI, ML, or large scale distributed systems
• Track record of defining and evolving technical architectures for AI powered platforms or products operating at global scale, including data pipelines, feature stores, and online inference systems
• Expertise in building and integrating ML models into production services, including experimentation frameworks, evaluation, monitoring, and safe rollout strategies for AI driven features
• Experience leading cross functional technical initiatives and establishing best practices for reliability, performance, security, and cost optimization in AI intensive systems
• Familiarity with AI driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real world products, including safely integrating and operating AI/ML enabled solutions that improve outcomes, and providing technical leadership on responsible and efficient AI use appropriate to a principal level AI engineer

Responsibilities

• Drive the technical vision, architecture, and implementation of AI driven systems and services that power critical Expedia Group products across multiple domains
• Design and review complex system architectures, including detailed low-level designs, API contracts, and data models that enable robust, scalable, and secure AI capabilities
• Lead end to end delivery of AI features and platforms, from problem framing and data/feature strategy through model integration, evaluation, and safe deployment into production
• Build agentic systems that produce traveler data products that form the foundation of personalization across the entire customer journey, from user acquisition to post-trip engagement
• Mentor and technically guide engineers across teams, elevating AI engineering practices, code quality, observability, and reliability for services operating at global scale
• Collaborate with product, data science, and platform teams to translate ambiguous business and customer problems into well defined technical solutions leveraging ML, optimization, and intelligent automation
• Safely integrate and operate AI/ML enabled solutions that improve outcomes, including familiarity with AI driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real world products

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, all to fuel our employees' passion for travel and ensure a rewarding career journey
• 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: Principal
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees