Senior Principal Software Development Engineer

Travelport • Atlanta, GA

22h • Remote

About The Position

Travelport is seeking a Senior Principal Software Development Engineer to join their team. This role is responsible for leading the strategy, development, and adoption of engineering platforms, tools, and delivery capabilities that enable high-performing software teams across the organization. The ideal candidate will drive engineering excellence, modern software delivery practices, and platform standardization while partnering closely with Product, Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, and Engineering leadership. This is a remote position based in the US.

Requirements

• 10+ years designing, building, deploying, and operating production software.
• Deep, current, hands-on Java plus Python and/or TypeScript for AI/MCP work (polyglot).
• Demonstrated hands-on experience building MCP servers and agent / tool-use orchestration.
• Strong AI-native / LLM-facing API design alongside REST.
• Experience integrating and serving model-backed capabilities in production — inference APIs, serving paths, and the feedback loops that route production signals back to Data Science.
• Production-grade observability and evaluation for AI systems.
• Enough ML literacy (model behavior, evaluation, inference trade-offs) to partner deeply with Data Science; model training itself is not required.
• Mastery of modern cloud-native engineering: Kubernetes/containers, CI/CD, and production observability.
• A track record of building things that made other engineers materially more productive.
• Experience leading through technical authority and mentorship as an IC — not by managing an organization.

Nice To Haves

• Depth with agent frameworks, tool-use orchestration, and LLM application patterns.
• Data streaming/pipeline knowledge (e.g., Kafka) sufficient to build feedback loops; deeper data-lake tooling a plus.
• Internal developer platform / developer-experience work at scale.
• Service consolidation in large codebases.
• Cloud cost governance / FinOps sensibility.

Responsibilities

• Lead the strategy, development, and adoption of engineering platforms, tools, and delivery capabilities.
• Drive engineering excellence, modern software delivery practices, and platform standardization.
• Partner closely with Product, Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, and Engineering leadership.
• Design, build, and operate MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and related agent tooling and services.
• Design clean APIs across both AI-native / LLM-facing and traditional REST patterns.
• Own the production serving path plus the feedback-loop plumbing that routes production signals back to Data Science.
• Build observability and evaluation for AI systems — tracing, monitoring, and eval harnesses — as first-class platform capabilities.
• Advance continuous delivery by separating deployment from release (progressive rollouts, feature flags, telemetry-driven validation).
• Drive simplification before migration — consolidating services whose boundaries exist only because organizational boundaries once did.
• Generate high-value tests from real production behavior.
• Raise the whole team's throughput with AI in the development loop — agentic coding, AI-assisted testing and code review.
• Establish the patterns for using AI tools effectively and responsibly.
• Grow strong engineers into stronger ones through pairing, code review, and everyday coaching.
• Operate with "no private knowledge": everything you build is documented, observable, and survivable beyond any single person.
• Make cost visible and build cost literacy into the team's decisions.
• Define and improve the metrics that matter — delivery speed, quality, reliability, developer productivity — through engineering, not reporting.

Benefits

• Bonus program
• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Employer paid Disability and Basic Life Insurance
• Voluntary life options
• Competitive 401(k) match
• Voluntary benefits
• Generous paid time off policy
• Hybrid working model
• Annual volunteer day off
• New Child leave policy (16 weeks paid for birthing parent, 8 weeks for non-birthing parent)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed