Software Development Engineer III

Expedia, Inc.; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 146,000 - 204,500; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Paid time off

Employee Assistance Program

Travel discounts

Job summary

Expedia, Inc. is hiring a Backend Software Engineer in Seattle to lead complex projects and mentor junior engineers. The ideal candidate will possess strong system design, API design, and data modeling skills, bringing over 5 years of experience.

Responsibilities include designing and evolving highly available services and collaborating with product teams. A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science is required, along with experience in AWS and AI/ML systems.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant professional experience.
• Proven ownership of complex services including design, implementation, and operational health.
• Experience with distributed systems and services.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve complex, highly available services.
• Lead end-to-end implementation of technical solutions.
• Drive technical direction and influence architectural decisions.

Skills

Java

Scala

Kotlin

AI/ML concepts

System design

API design

Data modeling

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field

Tools

AWS

Kafka Streams

Redis

Couchbase

Memcached

Job description

As a Backend Software Engineer, you will be a high-performing individual contributor responsible for leading complex, well-defined projects and improving existing systems through sound engineering principles. You will mentor more junior engineers, contribute to shared problem solving across teams, and help drive technical solutions that meet both project and business needs. You will bring strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, experience working across multiple technologies, and the ability to design, build, test, monitor, and debug moderately complex systems and APIs used across the business unit.

You are comfortable evaluating technology choices for different use cases and understand how applications, databases, and platforms work together. You apply software design principles, computer science fundamentals, and database knowledge to write clean, maintainable, testable, and observable code. You also contribute through code reviews, production support, technical investigations, and operational initiatives such as troubleshooting and RCA efforts. You thrive in a dynamic environment, continuously build new technical skills, and share knowledge with your team to improve overall effectiveness.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and evolve complex, highly available services and applications, including system design (LLD), API design, and data modeling to support scalable customer and partner experiences across multiple domains.
• Lead end-to-end implementation of technical solutions, from requirements analysis and design through development, code review, testing, deployment, and ongoing support, ensuring high code quality and robust engineering practices.
• Drive technical direction for your area by evaluating tradeoffs, decomposing large problems into executable work, and influencing architectural decisions that improve reliability, performance, and security for multiple services.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, data, and other engineering teams to deliver features and platforms that are reusable, extensible, and adaptable across different lines of business and technology stacks.
• Safely integrate and operate AI/ML‑enabled solutions that improve outcomes, including familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real world products.
• Promote engineering excellence through automation, observability, and operational readiness, including incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement of services under your ownership.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field; or Equivalent related professional experience.
• 5+ years of relevant professional experience.
• Proven ownership of complex services or multi-service systems, including responsibility for design, implementation, operational health, and iterative improvement.
• Strong skills in system design (including low-level design), API design, and data modeling, with the ability to build scalable, maintainable, and testable solutions.
• Familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real world products, with an emphasis on safely integrating these capabilities into existing services.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience designing and evolving architectures for large-scale, distributed systems, including cross-service integrations, data flows, and resilience patterns.
• Demonstrated track record of driving operational excellence, including monitoring, alerting, performance tuning, incident management, and building tools or frameworks that improve service reliability.
• Ability to influence technical strategy across teams or domains, mentoring other engineers, leading design reviews, and setting standards for code quality and system design (LLD, API design, and data modeling).
• Experience leveraging data and experimentation to inform technical and product decisions, including defining metrics, analyzing system behavior, and validating impact.
• Hands‑on experience integrating or extending AI/ML-enabled components in production systems (such as recommendation, ranking, or decisioning services), with a focus on reliability, safety, and responsible use of AI, including safely integrating and operating AI/ML‑enabled solutions that improve outcomes at the SDE III level.
• Hands‑on experience in software development using Java or similar object‑oriented programming languages, or Scala or Kotlin or similar functional languages.
• Proven experience building and operating scalable distributed systems and services within AWS cloud infrastructure or similar technologies.
• Designed and implemented distributed, event‑driven systems using Kafka Streams, AWS Kinesis, or similar.
• Optimize for low‑latency and high‑throughput processing (1M+ TPS) microservices.
• Implemented auto‑scaling, blue‑green deployments, and canary releases and build and maintain SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs for critical services.
• Strong practical knowledge and experience developing robust caching solutions, utilizing technologies such as Redis or Couchbase or Memcached, or similar distributed caching tools.
• Experience working successfully on Agile development teams with a minimum of 5 engineers, understanding modern agile methodologies, version control systems, continuous integration, and continuous delivery practices.
• Understanding of relational and NoSQL databases, data structures, API patterns, and service‑oriented architectures.

The total cash range for this position in Seattle is $146,000.00 to $204,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $233,500.00, 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.expediggroup.com/life.

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.