Senior Engineering Manager — Hotels.com Technology

11310 Expedia.com Ltd.; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Travel perks

Flexible work model

Generous time-off

Parental leave

Job summary

Expedia Group’s Hotels.com Technology in London seeks a Senior Engineering Manager to lead a high-performing team responsible for the next generation of travel experiences. You will own technical direction, drive architecture, and collaborate closely with Product, Design, Data, Marketing, and Platform teams in small squads.

This hands-on leadership role emphasizes coding, design reviews, and upskilling engineers.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant professional experience and 3+ years of people management experience.
• Hands-on and able to write and review code.
• Experience leading end-to-end ownership of services or domains.
• Strong proficiency in object-oriented or functional programming, system design, API design, data modeling, testing strategies, and modern CI/CD.
• Experience with AI/ML-enabled systems and guiding teams in safely integrating these capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Lead a software engineering team in designing, building, and operating highly available, secure customer-facing services.
• Stay hands-on: contribute to design reviews, code reviews, prototypes, and production debugging.
• Shape technical strategy and long-term architecture for the areas you own, aligning with brand and business objectives.
• Grow engineers across domains and stacks so the team can rapidly take on new problem spaces.
• Maintain uncompromising quality and reliability in the shopping funnel with robust CI/CD, monitoring, and incident response.

Skills

Leadership

Hands-on coding

System design

AI/ML familiarity

Cross-team collaboration

Mentoring engineers

Education

Bachelor's Degree or Equivalent Level

Technical Degree Preferred

Job description

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. 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. Why Join Us? 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.

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to join Hotels.com Technology in London, building the next generation of one of the world's best-known travel brands. Our mission is to make Hotels.com distinctive, indispensable, and worth talking about — by relentlessly improving the marketplace fundamentals travelers expect, and then innovating well beyond those table stakes to delight and surprise them. Concretely, that means removing friction across the shopping funnel and holding an uncompromising bar for quality and reliability; earning more direct traveler relationships through clearly valuable, differentiated experiences surfaced at the right moments; and taking real swings on novel experiences that set the brand apart. This role is deliberately broad. Rather than owning a single fixed area, you will lead your team against the highest-leverage problems in the Hotels.com experience as our priorities evolve — shopping and conversion, traveler identity and loyalty, app and web experiences, and the platform capabilities underneath them. You will own technical direction and delivery for your team, drive system and API design for performance-critical, high-traffic customer-facing services, and partner closely with Product, Design, Data, Marketing, and Platform teams in small, end-to-end squads with clear ownership. This is a hands-on leadership role. We are not looking for a pure people manager: you are expected to stay technically current and close to the code — reviewing designs and pull requests, prototyping, debugging production issues alongside your engineers, and making credible technical calls yourself. Equally, you will deliberately upskill your engineers across domains and stacks, so the team can move to wherever the highest-value work is rather than being boxed into a single specialism. As a people-first leader, you will grow and support a high-performing team of engineers, balancing rapid delivery with platform health and long-term sustainability, while fostering a culture of safe AI/ML adoption, small experiments over long planning cycles, and strong engineering fundamentals. In this role, you will:

• Lead a software engineering team in designing, building, and operating highly available, performant, and secure customer-facing services, including system design (LLD), API design, and data modeling for complex traveler-facing capabilities.
• Stay hands-on: contribute directly to design reviews, code reviews, prototypes, and production debugging, setting the technical bar by example rather than by delegation alone.
• Work with your peers and your manager to shape technical strategy and long-term architecture for the areas you own, aligning engineering decisions with brand and business objectives, and re-pointing your team as priorities shift across the Hotels.com experience.
• Broaden your engineers' technical range — deliberately grow skills across domains, stacks, and disciplines so the team can take on new problem spaces quickly and is never limited to a single area.
• Hold an uncompromising bar for quality and reliability in the shopping funnel: set engineering quality and operational excellence standards, and ensure robust CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices are consistently applied.
• Move fast with incomplete information — make well-reasoned decisions without waiting for certainty or broad consensus, and validate assumptions through small, measurable experiments rather than long planning cycles.
• Hire, develop, and mentor engineers and managers, fostering a high-performing, inclusive culture focused on learning, accountability, and effective collaboration with product, design, data, and other partner organizations.
• Make AI and Machine Learning part of every mission — safely integrate and operate AI/ML-enabled solutions that measurably improve traveler outcomes and team velocity, applying AI/ML concepts to real-world products.
• Work with your peers to coordinate and prioritize delivery across workstreams, managing dependencies, risks, and cross-team integration to ensure coherent, timely delivery of end-to-end capabilities across product and domain contexts.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree or Equivalent Level; Technical Degree Preferred.
• 8+ years of relevant professional experience and 3+ years of people management experience.
• Experience managing engineering teams with end-to-end ownership of services or domains, including design, implementation, deployment, and ongoing operations for production services or multi-service systems.
• Currently hands-on and willing to remain so.
• You still write and review code, and can independently reason about designs, trade-offs, and production incidents.
• Candidates seeking a purely managerial, non-technical role are not a fit for this position.
• Strong proficiency in core software engineering practices, including object-oriented or functional programming, system design (LLD), API design, data modeling, testing strategies, and modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Demonstrated track record of growing engineers' technical skills, including coaching people into unfamiliar domains, stacks, or disciplines.
• Familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real world products, with the ability to guide teams in safely integrating and operating AI/ML-enabled solutions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading a broad technical area, setting technical direction, and driving architecture decisions for distributed systems at scale.
• Technical breadth across more than one stack or domain (for example backend and frontend, or web and native mobile), and a history of moving between them as needs change.
• Experience with high-traffic consumer e-commerce or marketplace experiences, and a track record of improving conversion, funnel quality, or customer engagement through experimentation.
• Demonstrated track record of improving system reliability, performance, and cost efficiency through data-driven decision making, experimentation, and continuous optimization.
• Proven ability to lead complex cross-team initiatives, align stakeholders across product and engineering, and deliver integrated solutions that span multiple services or domains.
• Experience defining and enforcing engineering standards for operational excellence, including observability, incident management, on-call practices, and post-incident learning.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving, evolving organization — able to take on ambiguous, high-priority problems and re-scope quickly as strategy sharpens.
• Advanced experience with safely integrating AI/ML-enabled capabilities into production systems at scale (such as personalization, ranking, recommendations, or intelligent automation), including governance, evaluation, and ongoing model-driven feature iteration, and providing strategic leadership on where and how to apply AI within your product and platform area.

Accommodation requests

Expedia Group is committed to providing an inclusive and accessible recruiting experience. If you need an accommodation or adjustment due to a disability during the application or recruiting process, please submit a request at https://expedia.service-now.com/askeg?id=job_accommodation.

About Expedia Group

Expedia Group includes three flagship consumer brands - Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo - along with a leading B2B travel business and travel advertising offerings. Across our brands and business, we help travelers explore the world with confidence and ease. Important notice Employment opportunities and job offers at Expedia Group will always come from Expedia Group's Talent Acquisition and hiring teams. Never share sensitive personal information unless you are confident of the recipient. Expedia Group does not extend job offers via email or messaging tools to individuals with whom we have not made prior contact. Our email domain is @expediagroup.com. The official place to find and apply for roles is https://careers.expediagroup.com/jobs/. Equal Opportunity 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, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability or age. Expedia Group (NASDAQ: EXPE) powers travel for everyone, everywhere through our global platform. Driven by the core belief that travel is a force for good, we help people experience the world in new ways and build lasting connections. We provide industry-leading technology solutions to fuel partner growth and success, while facilitating memorable experiences for travelers. 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™. For more information, visit www.expediagroup.com. 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 to 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 lifeatexpediagroup.com/jobs.

Equal Opportunity

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, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability or age.

Important notice Employment opportunities and job offers at Expedia Group will always come from Expedia Group's Talent Acquisition and hiring teams. Never share sensitive personal information unless you are confident of the recipient. Expedia Group does not extend job offers via email or messaging tools to individuals with whom we have not made prior contact. Our email domain is @expediagroup.com. The official place to find and apply for roles is https://careers.expediagroup.com/jobs/.