Principal AI Engineer- Customer Data Platform

Expedia•Seattle, WA

46d•Hybrid

About The Position

Expedia Group is leveraging AI to revolutionize engineering practices and deliver hyper-personalized traveler experiences. The Customer Data Platform team is central to this AI transformation, powering personalized experiences for over 700 million travelers annually across Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, and other brands. This dynamic team of engineers, data scientists, and product experts is pioneering the use of generative AI and agentic systems to process, understand, and activate traveler data at a massive scale. They are building autonomous AI systems that understand traveler intent, predict needs, and enable real-time hyper-personalized travel experiences. The team fosters a culture of innovation, encouraging experimentation and viewing failures as learning opportunities, with breakthrough ideas welcomed from everyone. Team members collaborate with industry leaders on complex challenges such as multi-modal travel planning, real-time personalization across diverse global markets, and developing AI that understands human travel desires. The Customer Data Platform team is seeking a proven, entrepreneurial, hands-on technical leader to define and implement the vision for AI-automated data engineering. This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of AI in travel technology and significantly impact how millions experience 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.