Principal Software Development Engineer (Loyalty)

Expedia Group•San Jose, CA

2d•$249,000 - $398,500

About The Position

Expedia Technology teams partner with our Product teams to create 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 that drive loyalty and traveler satisfaction. The Loyalty Engineering organization powers continuous engagement, re engagement, and re acquisition for travelers worldwide. We build the systems that create a durable growth flywheel for Expedia, deepening traveler relationships while driving measurable business impact across brands and markets. As a Principal Engineer, you will set the technical vision and architecture for the AI empowered Loyalty charter, designing and delivering intelligent engagement experiences powered by modern AI and agentic systems. You will shape system design across multiple distributed engineering teams and drive alignment with Product, Data Science, and platform leaders to build solutions that are scalable, reliable, and genuinely novel. Your influence will extend beyond any single team, shaping how Loyalty engineering approaches hard problems for years to come. This role calls for deep, hands on technical leadership, sound architectural judgment, and the ability to build alignment across teams without relying on formal authority. You are expected to be a multiplier: the person other engineers look to when a problem is ambiguous, high stakes, or genuinely hard.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
12+ years of relevant professional experience.
Demonstrated expertise in large scale system architecture, technical decision making, and delivery of complex solutions spanning multiple domains.
Strong technical depth across distributed services, cloud infrastructure, and applied AI, with particular strength in frontend architecture.
Hands on experience designing, building, and shipping AI powered products in production environments.
Proven ability to build experiences for personalization, experimentation, recommendation, loyalty, or growth platforms at scale.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex AI and architectural concepts clearly to engineers, product partners, and senior leaders alike.
Ability to build alignment across teams without relying on formal authority.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading architectural transformation and modernization initiatives for large, distributed systems.
Expertise in full stack engineering with a frontend leaning, and a proven ability to operate across multiple technical domains and platforms.
A track record of championing decisions grounded in data and operational excellence for mission critical systems.
Sound judgment in weighing tradeoffs between innovation, speed, scalability, and reliability.
A collaborative, positive presence who is known for attracting strong engineers and helping them grow.

Responsibilities

Set the architectural vision, design, and delivery approach for complex software solutions across multiple technical domains, enabling AI and machine learning powered loyalty offers and experiences.
Drive system design, API development, and data modeling so our platforms remain secure, maintainable, and able to perform at scale.
Take on the most technically demanding problems across the loyalty experience ecosystem, stepping in where existing solutions fall short and closing critical gaps.
Mentor and raise the bar for engineering teams, fostering technical excellence and encouraging genuine innovation across projects and domains.
Elevate and simplify, always keeping the underlying business problem and customer metrics in view rather than treating architecture as an end in itself.
Strengthen operational excellence by championing rigorous software development practices and engineering processes that scale with the organization.
Build a deep, functional understanding of the loyalty and travel foundations ecosystem, including its capabilities, dependencies, and architectural boundaries.