Principal AI Forward Deployed Engineer

Traveltechessentialist; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 249,000 - 349,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Paid time off

Travel discounts

Job summary

Expedia Group is seeking a Principal AI Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with business units, translating ambiguous AI challenges into measurable outcomes and rapidly prototyping and scaling AI solutions. You will lead with hands-on engineering and drive adoption across teams, balancing speed, reliability, security, and cost.

You will mentor senior engineers, establish standards, and partner with executives to define pragmatic delivery plans and value realization across travelers, partners,

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree with 12+ years of software engineering experience or master’s with 10+ years.
• Ownership of complex systems and cross-domain integration with Expedia Group.
• Hands-on experience building AI-enabled systems, tools, agents, or workflows.

Responsibilities

• Partner with leaders to discover high-value AI opportunities and define measurable outcomes.
• Own end-to-end AI initiatives from discovery to deployment and value realization.
• Coach senior engineers and scale AI capabilities across teams.
• Define a north star AI vision and ensure security, cost, privacy, and maintainability.

Skills

AI engineering

System design

Leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Data modeling

Mentoring

Observability

Education

Bachelor’s degree with 12+ years of experience

Master’s degree in CS or related

Tools

LLM platforms

Generative AI tools

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.

Principal AI Forward Deployed Engineer

Introduction to the Team

Within CTO Enablement, the AI Enablement and Culture Office is helping Expedia Group become AI-native by turning AI experimentation into measurable business impact—creating capacity, improving speed and quality, and building AI fluency across the enterprise. As a Principal AI Forward Deployed Engineer, you will embed with teams in Business Units/Enterprise functions across EG to identify high-value opportunities, translate ambiguous business challenges into measurable outcomes, and rapidly prototype, productionize, and scale AI-powered solutions.

You will be a highly influential technical leader who coaches senior individual contributors in leadership and engineering practices, partners with executive leaders, and turns emerging AI capabilities into reusable patterns, tools, and ways of working that teams can adopt. Combining deep hands-on engineering with strong partnership and change leadership, you will help teams adopt AI responsibly and at scale while keeping meaningful outcomes for travelers, partners, and employees at the center.

In this role, you will:

• Partner with business-unit and functional leaders, domain experts, end users, and technologists across Expedia Group to discover high-value AI opportunities, define measurable outcomes, and establish pragmatic delivery plans.
• Operate as a forward-deployed technical leader, partnering directly with business units and their teams to understand workflows, constraints, data, and systems, and owning engagements through delivery, adoption, and value realization.
• Own the full lifecycle of AI initiatives—from discovery to use‑case framing to technical design to rapid prototyping, production deployment, adoption, measurement, value realization and continuous improvement.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into measurable outcomes, explicit assumptions, data requirements, and scalable, resilient, maintainable AI‑enabled systems.
• Define and communicate a north star technology vision for AI capabilities within a business‑unit domain, workflow, or capability area with multiple teams, balancing speed to value with reliability, security, privacy, cost, and long‑term maintainability.
• Design highly complex systems that interact across a business unit, applying sound system design, API design, data modeling, observability, evaluation, and testability practices across multiple technologies and languages.
• Evaluate and select models, platforms, tools, and architectural patterns for AI use cases, including retrieval, orchestration, agentic workflows, human‑in‑the‑loop controls, and integration with enterprise systems.
• Establish and evangelize software and AI engineering standards across multiple teams, including architecture, data contracts, evaluation, testing, observability, operational excellence, security, privacy, cost management, and responsible AI.
• Convert lessons from individual deployments into reusable reference implementations, frameworks, prompts, evaluation approaches, engineering standards, and enablement materials.
• Define success measures before implementation and communicate impact across adoption, quality, productivity, capacity created, cycle time, cost, ROI, risk, and sustained business outcomes.
• Influence technical direction across multiple teams and stakeholder groups, aligning senior leaders and partners around domain strategy, trade‑offs, and measurable outcomes.
• Develop engineers, senior individual contributors, and emerging technical leaders; coach senior talent to operate independently and extend engineering practices across the organization.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree with 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, or a master’s degree with 10+ years of professional software engineering experience or equivalent professional experience.
• Demonstrated ownership of complex systems, workflows or platforms that support a business unit or function, and integrate with broader Expedia Group systems and cross‑domain capabilities.
• Deep expertise in professional software engineering practices across the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, operations, system design, API design, data modeling, and observability.
• Experience making technology and architecture choices across teams and multiple technologies or languages, while guiding others toward well‑defined solutions for complex systems.
• Hands‑on experience building, deploying, or operating AI‑enabled systems, tools, agents, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real‑world products or business processes.
• Experience working directly with partner business units and their teams to understand ambiguous needs, deliver usable technical solutions quickly, and drive adoption beyond the initial prototype or pilot.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience defining AI engineering, software engineering, or architecture best practices at a department or organizational level and establishing standards for operational excellence, code quality, scalability, resilience, observability, testability, evaluation, and responsible AI across multiple projects.
• Proven ability to shape product and technology direction, develop business‑unit and domain‑level AI architecture vision, while creating reusable patterns that can scale across Expedia Group.
• Experience designing and productionizing LLM, generative AI, retrieval‑augmented generation, agentic, conversational, or AI‑assisted workflow solutions.
• Experience establishing AI evaluation and governance practices, including quality measurement, hallucination mitigation, confidence scoring, human oversight, security, privacy, auditability, and monitoring.
• Experience serving as a trusted technical partner to executive and cross‑organizational leaders, influencing domain strategy and enabling decisions across cross‑functional teams.
• Demonstrated success mentoring engineers across multiple levels, coaching senior individual contributors in leadership skills, identifying rising talent, and supporting engineering‑management priorities through technical partnership when needed.
• Experience evaluating industry trends pragmatically, distinguishing durable opportunities from disruptive or short‑lived technologies, and applying AI/ML‑enabled approaches selectively to improve engineering, product, or operational outcomes.

The total cash range for this position in Seattle is $231,000.00 to $323,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $369,500.00, which is the top of the range, based on ongoing, demonstrated, and sustained performance in the role.

The total cash range for this position in San Jose is $249,000.00 to $348,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $398,500.00, which is the top of the range, based on ongoing, demonstrated, and sustained performance in the role.

Starting pay for this role will vary based on multiple factors, including location, available budget, and an individual’s knowledge, skills, and experience. Pay ranges may be modified in the future.

Benefits and perks

Expedia Group offers benefits and perks designed to support employees and their families, including medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, an Employee Assistance Program, wellness and travel reimbursement, travel discounts, and International Airlines Travel Agent Network (IATAN) membership. Learn more about life at Expedia Group at https://careers.expediagroup.com/life.

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, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. This employer participates in E-Verify. The employer will provide the Social Security Administration (SSA) and, if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with information from each new employee's I-9 to confirm work authorization.