Principal Enterprise Architect, Unified Search & Book
About The Position
The Principal Enterprise Architect for Search & Book defines the architectural vision and technical strategy for Priceline’s Search & Book platforms, including search and recommendation engines, unified search orchestration, checkout, booking engines, reservation management, and payment servicing. The role shapes a modern, seamless, and trusted customer journey, supported by an extensible, high-performance platform that enables product teams to innovate and improve search and checkout conversion. The architect establishes a long-term vision and practical roadmap, strengthens search, discovery, booking, and reservation systems, and designs distributed architectures that balance performance, resilience, cost, and maintainability. The role partners across engineering, product, data, analytics, customer care, and platform teams; leads modernization and technical-debt reduction; and mentors senior and staff engineers. It also evaluates technologies and vendors and identifies practical applications of AI and machine learning.
Requirements
- 12+ years in software engineering and architecture.
- Experience designing systems across search, recommendation, API-first and cloud-native architectures, microservices, and AI/ML, including generative AI.
- Hands-on software engineering background with strong full-stack technical credibility.
- Fluency in API design, event-driven systems, CI/CD, testing, and observability practices.
- Proficiency in data modeling across relational and non-relational stores, including selecting suitable datastores and determining access patterns, consistency, resilience, indexing, and partitioning strategies.
- Cloud-native experience.
- Experience working in environments requiring PCI DSS, SOX, SOC 2, and GDPR, with strong practices in auditability, traceability, and data governance.
- Strategic thinking and clear communication, with the ability to influence executives, peers, and engineers.
- Ability to simplify complexity and turn ambiguity into clear, actionable components.
- Unquestionable integrity and ethics.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with checkout, booking, or related travel and ecommerce journeys.
- Strong preference for Java or Spring Boot and Python.
- Cloud experience with GCP, including GKE, AlloyDB, Spanner, BigQuery, and Elasticsearch, and Aiven, including OpenSearch and Kafka.
Responsibilities
- Define the long-term architecture vision for Search & Book, including a practical roadmap and clear milestones.
- Strengthen systems for search resolution, typeahead, AI-powered discovery, booking engines, and reservation management to improve speed, reliability, and scalability.
- Design systems and patterns that can scale for agentic commerce.
- Design distributed systems that balance performance, resilience, cost, and maintainability at scale.
- Partner with Engineering, Product, Data, Analytics, Customer Care, and platform teams to establish clear ownership and integration patterns.
- Create reusable standards for APIs, event-driven systems, data exchange, experimentation, observability, and service integration.
- Lead modernization efforts that simplify legacy systems and reduce technical debt.
- Evaluate technologies and vendors through technical analysis, proofs of concept, and ROI assessments.
- Identify practical opportunities to apply AI and ML to improve search relevance and the checkout experience.
- Mentor senior and staff engineers while promoting clear thinking, simplicity, and strong engineering practices.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision, and mental health resources.
- Paid time off, holidays, a company-wide Priceline Pause reset week, and paid volunteer days.
- Ability to work up to four weeks per year from anywhere.
- Parental leave and dependent care and family support resources.
- Summer Fridays.
- Office perks such as stocked kitchens and catered meals, varying by location.
- Retirement plans with company contributions.
- Life and disability coverage.
- Tax-advantaged accounts.
- Employee-only discounts on hotels and flights, VIP deals, and Big Deal Bucks credits.
- Travel and partner discounts, tuition support, legal support, and pet benefits.
- Employee Resource Groups, social events, recognition programs, and service awards.
- Certain roles may be eligible for an annual bonus and/or equity grant.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
