Software Development Engineer III - Backend

Expedia•Seattle, WA

2d•$146,000 - $233,500•Hybrid

About The Position

Expedia Technology teams partner with the Product teams to create innovative products and services, delivering high-quality experiences for travelers & partners. A singular technology platform powered by data and machine learning provides secure, differentiated, and personalized experiences that drive loyalty and traveler satisfaction. The Air Reservations team is seeking a highly motivated backend Software Engineer to own and develop highly scalable, reliable services that form the core engine for flight bookings. These services sit at the intersection of airline supply and traveler demand and are mission-critical to enabling travelers to book and service their flights across Expedia's global platform. If you thrive on building systems that process millions of transactions every month across hundreds of airline suppliers — where reliability and performance directly impact traveler experience — we want you to join our team!

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field; or Equivalent related professional experience.
5+ years of relevant professional experience
Demonstrated ownership of a service or multiple services within a domain, with responsibility for delivery, quality, and operational performance.
Strong software engineering fundamentals, including coding, low-level system design, API design, data modeling, testing, debugging, and secure development practices.
Experience working across the software development lifecycle in distributed systems or service-oriented environments, with sound judgment in technical tradeoff decisions.

Nice To Haves

Background in building backend services in Java (Spring/Spring Boot or equivalent), including REST/gRPC (Protobuf) APIs, and components that are secure, scalable, and maintainable.
Experience with databases (SQL and NoSQL), query design and optimization, and data modeling for backend services.
Experience leading technical design for complex service enhancements or new capabilities within a domain, including scalable architecture, resilient APIs, and effective data models.
Operational excellence mindset, with demonstrated experience in incident management, root-cause analysis (RCA), and improving reliability and availability metrics.
Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies, comprehensive automated testing with strong code coverage, and code review practices.
Exposure to cloud platforms (preferably AWS) and container/orchestration technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
Experience with messaging and streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, SQS) and asynchronous processing patterns.
Background in e-commerce or other high-availability transactional systems is a plus.

Responsibilities

Design, build, test, and deliver reliable software solutions for a domain or set of services, using strong coding, low-level design, API design, and data modeling practices.
Own technical execution for complex initiatives, breaking down ambiguous problems into scalable solutions that meet product, engineering, and operational goals.
Contribute to architecture and design decisions across services, driving maintainability, performance, resilience, and secure engineering practices in production environments.
Partner effectively with engineers, product, and cross-functional stakeholders to deliver outcomes, improve development efficiency, and support fungibility across multiple technical domains.
Improve operational excellence by monitoring service health, resolving production issues, strengthening observability, and using data to guide quality, reliability, and performance improvements.
Safely integrate and operate AI/ML-enabled solutions that improve outcomes, including familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real world products.