Software Development Engineer II

Expedia, Inc.; Roma; On-site; EUR 50,000 - 70,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work model

Exciting travel perks

Generous time off

Career development resources

Job summary

A global travel technology company in Rome is looking for a Software Development Engineer II to build and maintain backend services for their landing platform. Applicants should have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and at least 2 years of experience in the field. Proficiency in Java or Kotlin is essential, alongside experience in designing APIs and data models. Join an innovative team that values diversity and promotes a flexible work environment with development resources and exciting travel perks.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience as a Software Development Engineer.
• Experience in production environments with backend services or APIs.
• Proficiency in Java or Kotlin programming languages.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain backend services for the Landing Platform.
• Implement high-quality low-level designs and API contracts.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to meet technical solutions.

Skills

Java

Kotlin

API design

Data modeling

Unit testing

Integration testing

CI/CD tooling

AI tools usage

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Job description

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 we 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 Landing Platform team is responsible for building and maintaining the backbone of Expedia Group’s landing page architecture; the entry experience for customers arriving from Google, metasearch engines, SEO channels, and paid advertising. The team operates at a massive global scale across all major Expedia brands, including Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, and multiple portfolio brands. Their work ensures these surfaces load quickly, perform reliably under extremely high traffic, and remain fully optimised for both human users and search engine crawlers. In addition to traditional SEO and performance tuning, the team is now shaping Expedia’s strategy for Agentic Engine Optimisation (AEO), ensuring that landing content integrates cleanly into emerging AI‑powered search experience travel queries.

This Software Development Engineer II role focuses on building the backend services and platform capabilities that power Expedia Group’s landing experiences at extraordinary scale. The work spans designing high‑performance services, ensuring reliability across millions of URL variants, and enabling the landing surfaces used by every major EG brand. Engineers in this role contribute to the technical foundation that drives SEO visibility, traffic acquisition, and page performance worldwide. The role also participates in innovation around how landing content is surfaced in AI driven search ecosystems, partnering closely with frontend engineers, product teams, and global stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain services and APIs that power the Landing Platform, enabling robust, performant, and reliable landing page experiences across multiple brands and surfaces.
• Implement high‑quality low‑level designs, including API contracts and data models, that align with platform architecture guidelines and support extensible, reusable components.
• Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and designers to translate business and customer requirements into technical solutions that can be reused across multiple domains and use cases.
• Own the end‑to‑end quality and operational health of the services you build, including automated testing, monitoring, observability, incident participation, and continuous improvement of reliability and performance.
• Contribute to code reviews, technical discussions, and documentation to raise the engineering bar, share knowledge across teams, and drive consistent engineering practices on the Landing Platform.
• Safely integrate and operate AI/ML‑enabled solutions that improve outcomes, including applying familiarity with AI‑driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real‑world products where appropriate to enhance landing experiences.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 2+ years of experience as a Software Development Engineer, including building and operating backend services or APIs in a production environment.
• Experience designing and implementing low‑level system designs, including API design and data modelling, for services that support multiple features or use cases.
• Proficiency in either Java or Kotlin, and associated frameworks used for service development, along with experience in unit testing, integration testing, and using CI/CD tooling.
• Experience owning the lifecycle of a service or component, including deployment, monitoring, basic troubleshooting, and iterative improvement within a team environment.
• Enthusiasm for using AI‑powered tools (e.g., code assistants, test generators, documentation helpers) to accelerate learning and delivery, with a track record of using them responsibly to refine, review, and debug your own code rather than replace fundamental engineering judgment.
• Awareness of and commitment to ethical AI use, including data privacy, security, and avoiding over‑reliance on AI‑generated outputs without appropriate validation and testing.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building and evolving shared platforms or services that support multiple product teams, brands, or domains, with an emphasis on reusability and configurability of landing experiences.
• Hands‑on experience with system design for distributed services, including designing APIs, data contracts, and storage models that perform reliably at scale and are easy for other teams to adopt.
• Demonstrated practice in applying observability, performance tuning, and operational best practices (including on‑call participation or incident response) to improve the availability and resilience of production services.
• Experience collaborating in a cross‑functional environment to iteratively ship and optimise platform capabilities, using data and experimentation to guide technical decisions and improvements.
• Familiarity with cloud architecture and platforms like AWS.

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.

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.