Senior Software Development Engineer (Java Backend)

Traveltechessentialist; City Of London; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading travel technology company is seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer specializing in Java Backend. This role involves maintaining high-quality software, mentoring junior engineers, and collaborating closely with business units to align technology with business needs. Candidates should possess over 8 years of experience in software development, particularly with Java or Kotlin, and be comfortable with on-call duties as part of a dynamic technical team. Competitive benefits and a supportive work environment are provided.

Benefits

Generous time-off

Parental leave

Flexible work model

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in Software Development, strong focus on backend.
• Experience mentoring at least 3 individuals.
• Ability to design solutions that are easily testable and observable.

Responsibilities

• Conduct day-to-day work and solve complex issues in engineering.
• Partner with the business to understand technology stack relevance.
• Maintain software applications and ensure code quality.

Skills

Java

Kotlin

Backend Development

Cloud Platforms

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in a related technical field

Tools

Testing and Monitoring Tools

Job description

Senior Software Development Engineer (Java Backend)

• United Kingdom - London
• Technology
• Full‑Time Regular
• 09/29/2025
• ID # R‑94877

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.

Introduction to the Team

Expedia Product & Technology builds 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 for the traveler and our partners that drive loyalty and customer satisfaction.

Price is a key factor influencing traveler’s path to driving a choice leading to a purchase. In a world of infinite paths to purchase, travelers make multiple searches and find the ‘best trip’ and ‘best deal’.

The Expedia Group Offers pillar is tasked with giving the customer a simple, clear, accurate, transparent pricing experience throughout their shopping and booking journeys. We do this by putting the customer first, creating capabilities and experiences that can be shared and presented to the customer that meet the travelers’ expectations in locally relevant ways and adhere to regulatory norms.

What you’ll do

• You will successfully conduct day‑to‑day work and solve complex issues in your own specific technical engineering area, will share domain and industry knowledge between cross‑functional teams and will serve as a guide to others by sharing and helping junior engineers in their duties, while reporting on status of difficult or high‑level projects to local tech leadership via written or oral means.
• You will partner with the business to have a clear understanding of how your own technology stack is tied to business outcomes and our bottom line and will advise on technical limitations of software design for products and provide alternative solutions.
• You will possess knowledge of features and facilities for integration, and communication among applications, databases and technology platforms to bring together different components and form a fully functional solution to a business problem.
• You will creatively test and maintain software applications and related programs and procedures by using a variety of software development tools following design requirements of customer.
• You will take technical responsibility for the health of the codebase, including quality, scalability, and performance and you will act as a spokesperson for software design best practices, research and recommend frameworks and architectural/code design patterns, identify areas of improvements within the code and suggest solutions and advocate for operational excellence (such as unit testing, establishing SLAs, programming for resiliency and scalability).
• You will take a whole systems approach to analyze issues and implement holistic solutions by ensuring that linkages between structure, people, process and technology are made and will strive for optimum organizational efficiency by applying systems thinking across boundaries and making recommendations about policies/ processes.

Who you are

• Bachelor’s degree or Master’s in a related technical field; or experience driving technical design end to end in at least 2 multi‑quarter projects as part of a decentralized team and project and several contributions to engineering community through a blog post, open‑source contribution, tech talks etc.
• 8+ years of Software Development work experience (Java or Kotlin experience strongly preferred) with a strong focus on backend development and solid experience working in high performance, high throughput, highly available and scalable services in cloud platforms. Experience formally mentoring at least 3 individuals is also required.
• Ability to identify business problems at the project level and team level, and design solutions that are easily testable and observable, making well defined technology choices and being able to justify them to technical and non‑technical observers. Also has a strong understanding of how team goals fit a business need.
• Able to understand highly complex systems and design moderately complex systems and can guide integrations across teams within business unit.
• Has a strong understanding of testing and monitoring tools and technologies and uses this knowledge to identify and advocate for project quality via testing, monitoring and alerting at the project level.
• Ability to establish operational excellence metrics at the team level.

On‑Call Requirement

This position requires the employee to be on‑call outside of regular working hours. On‑call duties encompass:

• Responding to emergencies or incidents as they arise
• Providing prompt support and solutions
• Participating in on‑call rotations, including nights, weekends, and bank holidays
• Remaining reachable by phone or other communication methods at all times during on‑call periods

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 through the Accommodation Request.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability or age.

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.