Principal Software Development Engineer

Principal Software Development Engineer

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.

Our Technology Team partners with teams across Expedia Group to create innovative products, services, and tools to deliver high-quality experiences for travelers, partners, and our employees. A singular technology platform powered by data and machine learning provides secure, differentiated, and personalized experiences that drive loyalty and traveler satisfaction.

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.

As a Principal Engineer you will be part of an agile development team with lots of Linux, cloud, and containerization experience. You will play a key role in crafting the strategic technical goals for our group. The main effort will involve leading the architecture, design, and building 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.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 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.

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.

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.