Software Development Engineer III

Expedia Group•Chicago, IL

1d•$136,000 - $190,500•Hybrid

About The Position

At Expedia Group, we help travelers explore the world, one journey at a time. As a global travel company powered by passionate people, trusted partnerships, and leading technology, we connect travelers, partners, and advertisers through our consumer brands, B2B network, and travel advertising business. Here, you'll do meaningful work that helps millions of people discover, book, and experience travel with more ease, confidence, and joy. Our five Behaviors-Traveler First, Think Big, Operate with Excellence, Ownership Mindset, and Succeed Together-help foster a supportive environment where people can grow their careers and have the flexibility, benefits, and support to do their best work. Join us and build for travelers everywhere. Our Team We are the Expedia Group Advertising team. As a global leader in travel industry advertising, we connect advertisers with millions of travelers. This is a rapidly growing area of the business, with strong year-over-year growth, and a key area of long-term investment. Within this organization, you’ll join the Advertiser Team, which owns the advertiser-facing portal and the backend services and APIs that power it. These systems enable advertisers and third-party partners to configure, manage, and optimize ad campaigns across Expedia Group platforms. You will work collaboratively with engineers, product, and cross-functional partners across a globally distributed organization to build impactful solutions for advertisers and travelers worldwide. The Role As a Software Development Engineer II, you will play a critical role in building and scaling high-performance systems that support Expedia Group’s expanding advertising network. This role is primarily backend-focused (approximately 70–80%), with some frontend development (20–30%) supporting customer-facing experiences built in React. You will contribute to a multi-year initiative to design and evolve a unified advertising platform, consolidating multiple ad products into a single, scalable system. Your work will directly influence advertiser experiences and shared capabilities across the platform.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
5+ years of software development experience building and supporting production systems and services
Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and core computer science fundamentals
Experience owning components or services, including implementation, testing, deployment, and operational support
Experience designing and building scalable backend systems and APIs
Expertise in Java or Kotlin and familiarity with React
Experience with API design and consumption, including REST and/or GraphQL
Experience working across multiple technical systems or services, with the ability to debug and deliver maintainable solutions

Nice To Haves

Experience building software for advertising technology, marketplaces, or other high-scale distributed systems
Experience with event streaming or messaging systems (e.g., Flink, Kafka, or similar real-time data processing technologies)
Experience contributing to architecture and design discussions for services, APIs, and data models
Demonstrated ability to improve service quality through performance tuning, observability, and automation
Experience using metrics and data to inform engineering decisions and measure impact
Familiarity with AI-driven systems and/or AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude)
Experience building customer-facing features, including frontend development with React
Background working on large-scale, high-throughput systems or platforms
A strong sense of ownership, with a track record of delivering solutions end-to-end
Ability to collaborate effectively across teams and contribute to a highly collaborative engineering culture
Passion for building scalable, high-performance systems and improving the developer and customer experience
Interest in solving complex problems in a fast-growing, high-impact area of the business

Responsibilities

Design, build, test, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs that power the advertiser portal and enable third-party integrations
Contribute to the development of a unified ads platform, delivering reusable capabilities across multiple advertising products
Own features and services end-to-end—from design and implementation to deployment and operational support
Apply strong coding fundamentals to deliver high-quality, maintainable, and extensible solutions
Participate in system design, low-level design, API design (including GraphQL), and data modeling
Build customer-facing features (primarily backend-driven, with some React frontend contributions)
Drive improvements in scalability, performance, and reliability for high-traffic advertiser systems
Collaborate with engineering, product, operations, and globally distributed teams to translate business needs into technical solutions
Troubleshoot production issues and improve system health through monitoring, debugging, automation, and observability practices
Write secure, well-tested code, participate in code reviews, and follow engineering best practices
Leverage AI-enabled solutions and AI-assisted development tools to improve developer productivity and product outcomes