Director, Software Development Engineering

Expedia Group; Gurugram District; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Expedia Group is seeking a Director of Reservations engineering to lead the teams responsible for Conventional Lodging and Vrbo. You will define multi‑year technical strategy, champion API‑first and event‑driven design, and oversee a large engineering organization across multiple brands.

You will drive modern development practices, architecture decompositions, and robust governance, while focusing on reliability, performance, and international scalability.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 5+ years of people leadership across 40+ engineers.
• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent; a technical degree is preferred.
• Proven technical leadership in architecture and delivery for transactional/order management, e‑commerce, payments, or similar platforms at scale.
• Familiarity with AI‑driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real‑world products.

Responsibilities

• Own the Conventional Lodging and Vacation Rentals platforms, defining a multi‑year technical and organizational strategy.
• Shape API‑first, event‑driven architecture to support global scale and rapid product innovation.
• Lead design and delivery of an orchestration layer for orders with modern workflow engines and patterns.
• Decompose legacy capabilities into well‑bounded domains with clear contracts, SLIs/SLOs, and guardrails.
• Scale and lead a 50–60 person engineering organization with a team‑of‑teams model, fostering psychological safety and accountability.
• Drive engineering excellence, improving design, testing, observability, and release practices.

Skills

People leadership

Technical leadership

AI/ML familiarity

System design

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent

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.

Introduction To Team

As Director, you will lead the engineering organization responsible for Reservations across two of Expedia Group's largest lines of business: Conventional Lodging (hotels) and Vacation Rentals (Vrbo). This platform ensures that the booking is completed across all systems starting from the moment a traveler clicks "book" till the moment a supplier, a hotel property or a vacation rental host, actually confirms that room or home. It is the system of record and execution for every reservation created, retrieved, changed, cancelled, and reconciled across every EG brand and every point of sale, globally.

The scale of these platforms is substantially high since Conventional Lodging alone represents a large majority of Expedia's transaction volume, processing bookings across local inventory, third-party inventory, and GDS supply. Vacation Rentals adds a second, structurally distinct booking model, whole-property rentals with owner/property-manager supply, dynamic quote-and-hold flows, and its own settlement and payout mechanics. Across both businesses, this organization owns dozens of production services spanning booking orchestration, price/availability validation, fulfillment, cancellation, change management, settlement, and event publishing to finance and analytics.

Platform capabilities you will own and continue to raise the bar on:

• Scalability — supporting booking, retrieve, and post-booking traffic that scales across markets, brands, and business models without re-architecting for every new use case.
• High-performance — the team is actively driving end-to-end booking latency down, because every additional second at checkout measurably costs conversion and revenue.
• High throughput — the platform must absorb booking, price-check, and inventory-adjustment traffic at production scale continuously, including peak demand events, without degrading the traveler experience.
• Resiliency — this is a highly compliant and audited revenue-critical system, designed with redundancy, safe rollout mechanisms, and recovery paths, because a failed booking is a failed sale.

In This Role, You Will

• Own the Conventional Lodging (hotels) and Vacation Rentals (Vrbo), defining and evolving a multi‑year technical and organizational strategy in partnership with Product, Architecture, and Operations.
• Shape a modular, API‑first, event‑driven architecture that supports rapid product innovation, new lines of business, and global scale.
• Lead the design and delivery of a workflow‑centric order orchestration layer using modern workflow engines and patterns (e.g., long‑running transactions, sagas, event sourcing) to ensure consistency and flexibility.
• Drive decomposition of legacy capabilities into well‑bounded domains and services with clear contracts, SLIs/SLOs, and guardrails, ensuring the platform is highly available, performant, observable, and cost‑efficient.
• Scale and lead a 50–60 person engineering organization through a team‑of‑teams model, setting clear outcomes and expectations, building hiring and succession plans, and fostering a culture of psychological safety, inclusion, high accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Drive engineering and operational excellence, raising the bar on design and code quality, testing, documentation, observability, release practices, and partnering with SRE/operations on robust incident management and learning loops.
• Define and track key platform and engineering metrics (e.g., availability, latency, throughput, correctness, unit cost, developer productivity) to guide priorities and trade‑offs.
• Lead through influence across Travel Foundations and Expedia Group, representing the OMS domain in cross‑functional forums, aligning roadmaps and dependencies, and communicating strategy, risks, and outcomes to senior leadership.
• Accelerate learning, modernization, and responsible AI/ML usage, championing modern development practices (CI/CD, trunk‑based development, automated testing, canary/blue‑green, feature flags) and safely integrating AI/ML‑enabled or rules‑based decisioning where it improves outcomes.
• Invest in talent development, creating clear growth paths and development plans for managers, tech leads, and ICs using Expedia Group’s refreshed technology role expectations.

Minimum Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating large‑scale, distributed systems, including multi‑service or multi‑domain platforms.
• 5+ years of people leadership, including managing managers and leading organizations of 40+ engineers (ideally 50–60) across multiple teams.
• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent experience; a technical degree is preferred.
• Proven technical leadership in architecture and delivery for transactional/order management, e‑commerce, payments, or similar mission‑critical platforms at scale, with deep experience in service‑oriented and event‑driven architectures.
• Familiarity with AI‑driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real‑world products.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing or operating Conventional Lodging or core booking/fulfilment platforms in travel, e‑commerce, logistics, or payments.
• Hands‑on experience with modern workflow/orchestration engines and patterns for long‑running business processes.
• Background with cloud‑native platforms (e.g., container orchestration, service meshes, streaming platforms, managed databases) in a high‑scale environment.
• Experience leading globally distributed engineering teams and working across multiple time zones and cultures.
• Demonstrated success driving large‑scale modernization initiatives, such as domain‑driven decomposition of monoliths, platform consolidation, or migration to new architectures.
• Experience applying AI/ML or advanced analytics to improve platform reliability, efficiency, or decisioning in production systems.

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.