Principal Cloud Platform Engineer & Architect

Expedia

San Jose (CA)

On-site

USD 249,000 - 349,000

Full time

9 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Paid time off

Employee Assistance Program

Wellness and travel reimbursement

Travel discounts

IATAN membership

Job summary

Expedia Group in San Jose is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer to drive the architectural evolution of our Cloud Platform. You will own cell-based architecture, modernize Kubernetes, and lead reliability and observability across global services.

This role blends hands-on prototyping with production-grade engineering, focusing on cost-aware cloud designs, standardized Dev Containers, and agent-friendly infrastructure to empower many teams while controlling spend.

Qualifications

Extensive professional software development experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, cloud-native distributed systems and platform services on Kubernetes.
Proven ownership of critical services or multi-service platforms, including responsibility for system design (LLD), API design, data modeling, deployment, and ongoing operational health.
Deep expertise with at least one major public cloud provider and core platform technologies (compute, networking, storage, service discovery, security, observability, and CI/CD).
Demonstrated ability to make high-impact architectural decisions, navigate complex trade-offs, and guide multiple teams toward coherent, long-term technical direction.

Responsibilities

Lead Architectural Evolution: You’ll own the move toward a Cell-Based Architecture. We need to move away from fragile, monolithic clusters and toward isolated, predictable failure domains that allow us to scale horizontally with confidence.
Modernize Kubernetes & Infrastructure: You’ll define our K8s strategy, focusing on multi-cluster management, service mesh, and automated scaling. You need to ensure our "Golden Path" makes it easy for engineers to do the right thing by default.
Hardened Reliability & Observability: You will set the standards for SRE across the org. This means moving beyond basic dashboards to causal observability, automated incident response, and rigorous SLO/SLI management. You’ll help us engineer out the root causes of systemic instability.
Optimize Cloud Economics: You’ll lead our FinOps technical strategy. You need to build the tooling and visibility that allows us to understand cost-per-service and ensures our infrastructure spend is directly tied to business value.
Support the Developer Workflow: While we are embracing AI tools, your job is to build the underlying "agent-friendly" infrastructure. This includes standardized Dev Containers and episodic environments that allow for fast, isolated iteration without clobbering shared state.
A Systems Architect: You understand the deep plumbing of the cloud (AWS/GCP, K8s, networking). You think in terms of failure domains, latencies, and unit economics.
Reliability-First: You’ve carried a pager for global-scale systems. You have a healthy "paranoia" about state, consistency, and cascading failures.
Hands-on: You still love to build. You can prototype a complex infrastructure change in a weekend to prove it works, but you have the discipline to ensure it’s production-grade before it ships.