Principal Software Development Engineer — Platform & Infrastructure

Principal Software Development Engineer — Platform & Infrastructure

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.

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.

We are hiring a hands-on Principal Software Development Engineer to lead the design, implementation and operational excellence of our cloud infrastructure and platform capabilities. This role emphasizes platform engineering: designing and delivering a scalable, reliable, secure, observable, and cost-efficient runtime platform (Kubernetes, containers, CI/CD, IaC, cloud services) used by multiple product teams. You will both set strategy and be embedded in the code and infrastructure to execute the roadmap end-to-end.

You will shape the foundational platform that powers customer-facing services across brands, increasing developer velocity, reducing operational risk, and optimizing cloud spend. This role is ideal for a leader who can design complex systems, implement solutions in production, and lead broad cross-team adoption.

What You Will Do:

• Define the technical strategy, roadmap and standards for cloud infrastructure and platform capabilities (container runtime, orchestration, networking, CI/CD, observability, security, IaC)
• Lead migration and platform adoption efforts (containerization, Kubernetes/EKS, runtime platform) and drive roadmap execution end-to-end
• Be an active code and IaC contributor (Terraform/CloudFormation/Helm, platform services, automation) and perform design/code reviews
• Design scalable, resilient, and secure infrastructure patterns for microservices, data stores, caching, and messaging
• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines, release automation, testing strategies, and safe deployment practices
• Drive SRE and observability practices: define SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, tracing, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and post-mortems
• Lead capacity planning, performance tuning, and traffic engineering for high-scale workloads
• Own and evangelize AWS cost optimization practices (rightsizing, reserved/spot strategies, architecture changes, cost monitoring and show back)
• Define and enforce platform standards, security controls, environment tagging, and operational excellence practices across teams
• Mentor and grow senior and mid-level engineers; identify high-potential talent and raise engineering standards
• Collaborate closely with product, security, platform, and operations stakeholders to align technical solutions with business goals and compliance requirements

Minimum Qualifications:

• 10+ years professional software engineering experience with significant hands-on experience building and operating distributed cloud services
• Strong, demonstrable experience building and running platforms on AWS (EKS, ECS, EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS, ELB/ALB, Auto Scaling)
• Deep hands-on experience with containerization and Kubernetes at scale (EKS or comparable)
• Practical experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and Helm charts
• Proven record of contributing production code and platform automation (languages such as Go, Python, Java, or similar)
• Experience designing for resilience, observability, security and operational automation
• Familiarity with CI/CD tooling and developer workflows (Spinnaker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar)
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives and influence architectural decisions
• Strong communication skills and experience mentoring engineers

Preferred Qualifications:

• Prior platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure leadership at scale
• Experience with monitoring/observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger)
• Proven experience with AWS cost optimization strategies and tooling (Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, billing APIs)
• Knowledge of service meshes (Istio, Linkerd, VPC Lattice), API gateways, and advanced networking patterns
• Experience with security/compliance for cloud environments, secrets management, and policy-as-code
• Experience migrating monoliths to cloud-native architectures

The total cash range for this position in San Jose is $242,000.00 to $338,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $387,000.00, which is the top of the range, based on ongoing, demonstrated, and sustained performance in the role. Starting pay for this role will vary based on multiple factors, including location, available budget, and an individual's knowledge, skills, and experience. Pay ranges may be modified in the future.

Expedia Group is proud to offer a wide range of benefits to support employees and their families, including medical/dental/vision, paid time off, and an Employee Assistance Program. To fuel each employee's passion for travel, we offer a wellness & travel reimbursement, travel discounts, and an International Airlines Travel Agent (IATAN) membership.

Accommodation requests: If you need assistance with any part of the application or recruiting process due to a disability, or other physical or mental health conditions, please reach out to our Recruiting Accommodations Team.

Expedia Group's family of brands includes: Brand Expedia®, Hotels.com®, Expedia® Partner Solutions, Vrbo®, trivago®, Orbitz®, Travelocity®, Hotwire®, Wotif®, ebookers®, CheapTickets®, Expedia Group™ Media Solutions, Expedia Local Expert®, CarRentals.com™, and Expedia Cruises™. © 2024 Expedia, Inc. All rights reserved. Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners. CST: 2029030-50

Employment opportunities and job offers at Expedia Group will always come from Expedia Group's Talent Acquisition and hiring teams. Never provide sensitive, personal information to someone unless you're confident who the recipient is. Expedia Group does not extend job offers via email or any other messaging tools to individuals with whom we have not made prior contact. Our email domain is @expediagroup.com. The official website to find and apply for job openings at Expedia Group is careers.expediagroup.com/jobs.

Expedia is committed to creating an inclusive work environment with a diverse workforce. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. This employer participates in E-Verify. The employer will provide the Social Security Administration (SSA) and, if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with information from each new employee's I-9 to confirm work authorization.