Principal Software Development Engineer

Expedia • San Jose, CA

17h

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. Principal Software Development Engineer We’re seeking a motivated Principal Software Development Engineer with a passion for technology, problem solving, and out-of-the-box thinking to be part of our Runtime Team. Our team is responsible for building a container platform with a suite of capabilities to enable our developers to rapidly deploy and scale containerized workloads . What you’ll do: As a Principal Engineer you will be part of an agile development team with lots of Linux, cloud, and containerization experience. Y ou will play a key role in crafting the strategic technical goals for our group. The main effort will involve leading the architecture , design and build ing a compute runtime platform based on Kubernetes that will be used by all engineering teams across Expedia. You will provide technical leadership for a dynamic and growing engineering organization. You will work alongside a talented group of product managers and other technical leaders to deliver best-in-class capabilities to our Expedia developer community, and as a result help shape the future of online travel. In this role, you will : Design and Implement Core Platform Components: Evolve our Kubernetes-based environment, focusing on areas like multi-tenancy, network policy, resource management, and service mesh integration (e.g., Istio, Linkerd ). Architect for Scale and Reliability: Lead the technical design for scaling our control plane and data plane to handle a 10x increase in services and traffic. Define and implement SLOs for the platform itself. Improve the Developer Control Plane: Design and build the next generation of our CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows. Drive the strategy for our internal developer portal (e.g., Backstage) to unify tooling, documentation, and service lifecycle management. Automate Infrastructure Lifecycle: Author and maintain production-grade Infrastructure as Code ( IaC ) using Terraform and/or Crossplane . Eliminate manual toil by automating cluster provisioning, node lifecycle, and dependency upgrades. Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Act as a force multiplier. Mentor senior engineers on the team, lead architecture review sessions, and author RFCs to build consensus on significant technical decisions. Your influence will extend beyond the team to application developers and SREs. Production Debugging: Serve as the final escalation point for complex, cross-cutting production incidents that involve the underlying platform, from kernel-level issues to CNI bugs to distributed system failures. Collaborate across product management, architecture, and engineering leads to deliver capabilities that enable our developer community to function at a high capacity Ability to explore/use a wide variety of technologies and tools such as (but are not limited to) Java, Go, AWS, Docker, Hashicorp Tools (Terraform, Consul, Vagrant, Vault, Nomad), Kubernetes, Argo, Istio, Helm , etc. Advocate for operational excellence (such as unit testing, establishing SLAs, programming for resiliency and scalability) Take ownership of high stress scenarios by remaining calm, employing critical thinking and data driven decision-making practices

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in infrastructure automation, configuration management or container orchestration.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Strong programming skills in one or more languages: Java, Go, Python or Ruby.
• Experience in cloud computing with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and containerization with Docker and Kubernetes/EKS.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Stateless and Stateful workloads, Service Mesh or Service Discovery, Monitoring, Alerting and Logging.
• Understanding of security development principles such as token management, encryption, and certificates.
• Experience with Continuous Integration tools like Jenkins or similar.
• Experience building self-service technology platform capabilities, particularly in the container compute, traffic management, or API management spaces.
• Experience mentoring other engineers and establishing standards for operational excellence and code quality at a multi-project level.

Responsibilities

• Design and Implement Core Platform Components: Evolve our Kubernetes-based environment, focusing on areas like multi-tenancy, network policy, resource management, and service mesh integration (e.g., Istio, Linkerd ).
• Architect for Scale and Reliability: Lead the technical design for scaling our control plane and data plane to handle a 10x increase in services and traffic. Define and implement SLOs for the platform itself.
• Improve the Developer Control Plane: Design and build the next generation of our CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows. Drive the strategy for our internal developer portal (e.g., Backstage) to unify tooling, documentation, and service lifecycle management.
• Automate Infrastructure Lifecycle: Author and maintain production-grade Infrastructure as Code ( IaC ) using Terraform and/or Crossplane . Eliminate manual toil by automating cluster provisioning, node lifecycle, and dependency upgrades.
• Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Act as a force multiplier. Mentor senior engineers on the team, lead architecture review sessions, and author RFCs to build consensus on significant technical decisions. Your influence will extend beyond the team to application developers and SREs.
• Production Debugging: Serve as the final escalation point for complex, cross-cutting production incidents that involve the underlying platform, from kernel-level issues to CNI bugs to distributed system failures.
• Collaborate across product management, architecture, and engineering leads to deliver capabilities that enable our developer community to function at a high capacity
• Ability to explore/use a wide variety of technologies and tools such as (but are not limited to) Java, Go, AWS, Docker, Hashicorp Tools (Terraform, Consul, Vagrant, Vault, Nomad), Kubernetes, Argo, Istio, Helm , etc.
• Advocate for operational excellence (such as unit testing, establishing SLAs, programming for resiliency and scalability)
• Take ownership of high stress scenarios by remaining calm, employing critical thinking and data driven decision-making practices

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