Principal Software Development Engineer — Platform & Infrastructure

Expedia, Inc.; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 231,000 - 370,000; Full time

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 is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer to lead the design, implementation, and operational excellence of cloud infrastructure and platform capabilities across teams. You will shape scalable, secure, observable runtime platforms and drive end-to-end execution.

You will own the technical strategy, mentor engineers, and collaborate with product, security, and operations to align solutions with business goals.

Qualifications

• 10+ years professional software engineering experience.
• Strong, demonstrable experience building and running platforms on AWS (EKS, ECS, EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS, ELB/ALB, Auto Scaling).
• Deep hands‑on experience with containerization and Kubernetes at scale (EKS or comparable).
• Practical experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and Helm charts.
• Proven record of contributing production code and platform automation (Go, Python, Java, or similar).
• Experience designing for resilience, observability, security and operational automation.
• Familiarity with CI/CD tooling and developer workflows (Spinnaker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar).
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross‑team technical initiatives and influence architectural decisions.
• Strong communication skills and experience mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical strategy, roadmap and standards for cloud infrastructure and platform capabilities (container runtime, orchestration, networking, CI/CD, observability, security, IaC)
• Lead migration and platform adoption efforts (containerization, Kubernetes/EKS, runtime platform) and drive roadmap execution end‑to‑end
• Be an active code and IaC contributor (Terraform/CloudFormation/Helm, platform services, automation) and perform design/code reviews
• Design scalable, resilient, and secure infrastructure patterns for microservices, data stores, caching, and messaging
• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines, release automation, testing strategies, and safe deployment practices
• Drive SRE and observability practices: define SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, tracing, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and post‑mortems
• Lead capacity planning, performance tuning, and traffic engineering for high‑scale workloads
• Own and evangelize AWS cost optimization practices (rightsizing, reserved/spot strategies, architecture changes, cost monitoring and show back)
• Define and enforce platform standards, security controls, environment tagging, and operational excellence practices across teams
• Mentor and grow senior and mid‑level engineers; identify high‑potential talent and raise engineering standards
• Collaborate closely with product, security, platform, and operations stakeholders to align technical solutions with business goals and compliance requirements

Skills

Cross-team collaboration

Mentoring engineers

Strategic leadership

Communication skills

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

CloudFormation

Helm

Go

Python

Java

AWS

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 Software Development Engineer — Platform & Infrastructure

Introduction to Team:

Expedia Technologyteamspartner with our Product teams to create innovative products, services, and tools to deliver high-quality experiences for travelers, partners, and our employees. A singular technology platform powered by data and machine learning provides secure, differentiated, and personalized experiences that drive loyalty and traveler satisfaction.

We are hiring a hands‑on Principal Software Development Engineer to lead the design, implementation and operational excellence of our cloud infrastructure and platform capabilities. This role emphasizes platform engineering: designing and delivering a scalable, reliable, secure, observable, and cost‑efficient runtime platform (Kubernetes, containers, CI/CD, IaC, cloud services) used by multiple product teams. You will both set strategy and be embedded in the code and infrastructure to execute the roadmap end‑to‑end.

You will shape the foundational platform that powers customer‑facing services across brands, increasing developer velocity, reducing operational risk, and optimizing cloud spend. This role is ideal for a leader who can design complex systems, implement solutions in production, and lead broad cross‑team adoption.

What you will do:

• Define the technical strategy, roadmap and standards for cloud infrastructure and platform capabilities (container runtime, orchestration, networking, CI/CD, observability, security, IaC)
• Lead migration and platform adoption efforts (containerization, Kubernetes/EKS, runtime platform) and drive roadmap execution end‑to‑end
• Be an active code and IaC contributor (Terraform/CloudFormation/Helm, platform services, automation) and perform design/code reviews
• Design scalable, resilient, and secure infrastructure patterns for microservices, data stores, caching, and messaging
• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines, release automation, testing strategies, and safe deployment practices
• Drive SRE and observability practices: define SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, tracing, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and post‑mortems
• Lead capacity planning, performance tuning, and traffic engineering for high‑scale workloads
• Own and evangelize AWS cost optimization practices (rightsizing, reserved/spot strategies, architecture changes, cost monitoring and show back)
• Define and enforce platform standards, security controls, environment tagging, and operational excellence practices across teams
• Mentor and grow senior and mid‑level engineers; identify high‑potential talent and raise engineering standards
• Collaborate closely with product, security, platform, and operations stakeholders to align technical solutions with business goals and compliance requirements

Minimum qualifications:

• 10+ years professional software engineering experience with significant hands‑on experience building and operating distributed cloud services
• Strong, demonstrable experience building and running platforms on AWS (EKS, ECS, EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS, ELB/ALB, Auto Scaling)
• Deep hands‑on experience with containerization and Kubernetes at scale (EKS or comparable)
• Practical experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and Helm charts
• Proven record of contributing production code and platform automation (languages such as Go, Python, Java, or similar)
• Experience designing for resilience, observability, security and operational automation
• Familiarity with CI/CD tooling and developer workflows (Spinnaker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar)
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross‑team technical initiatives and influence architectural decisions
• Strong communication skills and experience mentoring engineers

Preferred qualifications

• Prior platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure leadership at scale
• Experience with monitoring/observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger)
• Proven experience with AWS cost optimization strategies and tooling (Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, billing APIs)
• Knowledge of service meshes (Istio, Linkerd, VPC Lattice), API gateways, and advanced networking patterns
• Experience with security/compliance for cloud environments, secrets management, and policy‑as‑code
• Experience migrating monoliths to cloud‑native architectures

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.