Principal Enterprise Architect, Unified Search & Book

Priceline•Norwalk, CT

6d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal Enterprise Architect for Search & Book defines the architectural vision and technical strategy for Priceline’s Search & Book platforms, including the search and recommendation engine, unified search orchestration, checkout, booking engine, reservation management, and payment servicing across the customer journey. The role shapes a next-generation architecture for a modern, seamless, and trusted customer experience, built on an extensible, high-performance platform that helps product teams innovate faster and improve search and checkout conversion. The architect sets a long-term vision and practical roadmap, strengthens systems for search resolution, typeahead, AI-powered discovery, booking, and reservation management, and designs distributed systems and patterns that scale for agentic commerce. The position partners across engineering, product, data, analytics, customer care, and platform teams; leads modernization and technology evaluation; identifies practical AI and ML opportunities; and mentors senior and staff engineers. Priceline follows a hybrid model with two onsite days, with remaining days available remotely or in the office.

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.
Strong preference for Java or Spring Boot and Python.
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 fit-for-purpose datastores and defining access patterns, consistency, resiliency, 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.
Ability to reduce complexity and enable teams to move faster and smarter.
Ability to resolve ambiguity into clear, actionable components.
Strategic thinking and clear communication, with the ability to influence executives, peers, and engineers.
Illustrated history of living Priceline’s values: Customer, Innovation, Team, Accountability, and Trust; unquestionable integrity and ethics.

Nice To Haves

Experience with checkout, booking, or related travel and ecommerce journeys.
Cloud experience with GCP, ideally GKE, AlloyDB, Spanner, BigQuery, or Elasticsearch.
Experience with Aiven, including OpenSearch or 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, resiliency, 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.
Generous 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 and, depending on location, stocked kitchens and catered meals.
Retirement plans with company contributions, life and disability coverage, and 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.