Principal Cloud Platform Architect — Kubernetes & FinOps

Traveltechessentialist; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 224,100 - 273,900; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Travel perks

Generous time‑off

Parental leave

Flexible work model

Career development resources

Job summary

Expedia Group in San Jose is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer to drive architectural evolution and Cloud Platform modernization. The role centers on cell-based architecture, Kubernetes strategy, and improving reliability with SRE standards and scalable observability.

You will lead FinOps initiatives and developer workflow improvements while guiding teams toward robust, cost-aware systems. A hands-on leader comfortable prototyping is expected.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale cloud-native distributed systems on Kubernetes.
• Proven ownership of critical services and multi-service platforms (design, data modeling, deployment, health).
• Deep expertise with at least one major public cloud (AWS or GCP) and core platform technologies.
• Ability to make high-impact architectural decisions and guide teams toward long-term direction.
• Familiarity with AI-driven systems and applying AI/ML concepts to cloud environments.
• Hands-on approach with production-grade implementations.

Responsibilities

• Lead architectural evolution toward a cell-based, horizontally scalable architecture.
• Define Kubernetes strategy for multi-cluster management, service mesh and automation.
• Set SRE standards, automation for incident response, and SLO/SLI management.
• Lead FinOps strategy, building tooling to tie infrastructure spend to business value.
• Support developer workflows with standardized Dev Containers and transient environments.

Skills

Kubernetes expertise

Cloud platforms

Go or Rust

Observability

IaC (Terraform Pulumi)

CI/CD

AI/ML concepts

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Expedia Group in San Jose is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer to drive architectural evolution and Cloud Platform modernization. The role centers on cell-based architecture, Kubernetes strategy, and improving reliability with SRE standards and scalable observability.

You will lead FinOps initiatives and developer workflow improvements while guiding teams toward robust, cost-aware systems. A hands-on leader comfortable prototyping is expected.