Senior Backend Engineer - AI-Driven Systems & APIs

Expedia; Washington; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Expedia Group is seeking an experienced Senior Backend Engineer to design, build, and operate scalable backend services that power lodging and travel experiences. You will craft API-first architectures, model data flows, and ensure secure, maintainable systems.

This AI-forward team develops LLM-powered features and tool integrations with attention to latency, cost, and reliability. You will drive responsible AI adoption, implement automated testing and observability, and collaborate with

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of professional experience building and operating production backend services in a team environment.
• Demonstrated ownership of services or features across design, implementation, quality, deployment, and operational support.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, system design (LLD), API design, and data modeling, applied in production systems.
• Hands-on, demonstrable proficiency with AI-assisted development: you can describe specific workflows where AI tools measurably improved your speed or quality, and where they failed and how you caught it.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI/ML or LLM capabilities into a production system (for example, calling model APIs, building tool or agent integrations, or operating ML-backed services).

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve reliable backend services, including system design (LLD), API design, and data modeling for scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions.
• Use AI coding assistants and agentic workflows as part of your daily engineering practice (design exploration, code generation, test authoring, refactoring, code review, debugging, and incident triage), and critically validate the output for correctness, security, and maintainability.
• Design and ship AI/ML-enabled capabilities in backend services, such as LLM-powered features, agent and tool integrations, and retrieval or automation workflows, with attention to latency, cost, quality evaluation, and failure modes.
• Define and promote team practices for responsible AI adoption: prompt and context management, evaluation and guardrails, data privacy, and compliance with EG security policies.
• Implement high-quality production code with an emphasis on automated testing, observability, performance, and operational excellence.
• Collaborate with product, design, and partner engineering teams to translate customer and business requirements into robust backend solutions, reusable service integrations, and well-structured data flows.
• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of services and features: development, testing, deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and incident resolution.
• Use data, metrics, experimentation, and analytics to prioritize work, validate hypotheses, and measure the impact of both product changes and AI-driven improvements to engineering productivity.
• Mentor engineers on effective, safe use of AI tooling and raise the team's overall velocity and quality.

Skills

Backend development

System design

API design

Data modeling

Ownership mindset

Mentoring

AI tooling

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

AI/ML tooling

LLM APIs

Job description

Expedia Group is seeking an experienced Senior Backend Engineer to design, build, and operate scalable backend services that power lodging and travel experiences. You will craft API-first architectures, model data flows, and ensure secure, maintainable systems.

This AI-forward team develops LLM-powered features and tool integrations with attention to latency, cost, and reliability. You will drive responsible AI adoption, implement automated testing and observability, and collaborate with