Principal Software Development Engineer

Expedia Group; Gurugram District; On-site; INR 6,000,000 - 12,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Expedia Group is seeking a Senior Principal Software Engineer to shape the technical direction for the Reservations platform across Hotels and Vrbo. You will lead architecture and system design, API definitions, data modelling, and trade-off evaluations across multiple services, guiding teams toward scalable, reliable solutions.

Join us to improve end-to-end booking latency, throughput, and resiliency while safely integrating AI/ML capabilities to deliver smarter travel experiences.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field; or Equivalent related professional experience
• 12+ years of relevant professional experience
• Ownership of complex systems and broad technical domains, with experience leading technical direction and architecture across multiple services, teams, or a significant engineering domain
• Strong expertise in system design, including low-level design, API design, data modelling, software development, and evaluation of scalable technical solutions
• Demonstrated ability to deliver reliable, maintainable, and secure systems while influencing engineering decisions across organizational boundaries

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve technical direction for complex products, services, and domains, delivering scalable solutions that support business and customer outcomes
• Lead architecture and system design, including low-level design, API design, data modelling, and evaluation of technical trade-offs across interconnected systems
• Drive engineering execution across multiple services or a broad technical domain, aligning teams on priorities, delivery approaches, and sustainable technical practices
• Apply deep technical expertise to solve ambiguous, high-impact problems while remaining effective across multiple engineering domains and technology stacks
• Establish operationally excellent solutions through practices that strengthen reliability, observability, performance, security, maintainability, and continuous improvement
• Safely integrate and operate AI/ML-enabled solutions that improve outcomes, applying familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, workflows, and AI/ML concepts to real-world products

Skills

System design

Architecture leadership

API design

Data modelling

Low-level design

Reliability

Observability

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science

Tools

Java/Kotlin

Spring

REST/gRPC

AWS

Datadog

Splunk

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

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 traveller clicks "book" till the moment a supplier, a hotel property or a vacation rental host, actually confirm 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, fulfilment, cancellation, change management, settlement, and event publishing to finance and analytics.

Typical technologies include Java/Kotlin, Spring, REST/gRPC, AWS, Datadog and Splunk.

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 traveller 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

• Define and evolve technical direction for complex products, services, and domains, delivering scalable solutions that support business and customer outcomes
• Lead architecture and system design, including low-level design, API design, data modelling, and evaluation of technical trade-offs across interconnected systems
• Drive engineering execution across multiple services or a broad technical domain, aligning teams on priorities, delivery approaches, and sustainable technical practices
• Apply deep technical expertise to solve ambiguous, high-impact problems while remaining effective across multiple engineering domains and technology stacks
• Establish operationally excellent solutions through practices that strengthen reliability, observability, performance, security, maintainability, and continuous improvement
• Safely integrate and operate AI/ML-enabled solutions that improve outcomes, applying familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, workflows, and AI/ML concepts to real-world products

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field; or Equivalent related professional experience
• 12+ years of relevant professional experience
• Demonstrated ownership of complex systems and broad technical domains, with experience leading technical direction and architecture across multiple services, teams, or a significant engineering domain
• Strong expertise in system design, including low-level design, API design, data modelling, software development, and evaluation of scalable technical solutions
• Demonstrated ability to deliver reliable, maintainable, and secure systems while influencing engineering decisions across organizational boundaries

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven experience designing and operating high-scale, distributed, or business-critical systems with strong reliability and performance requirements
• Demonstrated architecture leadership across complex, multi-service environments, including successful resolution of cross-team technical dependencies and trade-offs
• Experience using data and operational insights to guide engineering strategy, improve system outcomes, and prioritize technical investmentsAdvanced familiarity with AI/ML-enabled products or engineering workflows, including evaluating, integrating, and operating AI-driven solutions responsibly in production
• A record of advancing engineering excellence through technical mentoring, reusable patterns, automation, and continuous improvement across a broad engineering organization

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.