Principal Software Development Engineer — Platform & Infrastructure

Expedia Group brands power global travel for everyone, everywhere. We design cutting-edge tech to make travel smoother and more memorable, and we create groundbreaking solutions for our partners. Our diverse, vibrant, and welcoming community is essential in driving our success.

Why Join Us?

To shape the future of travel, people must come first. Guided by our Values and Leadership Agreements, we foster an open culture where everyone belongs, differences are celebrated and know that when one of us wins, we all win.

We provide a full benefits package, including exciting travel perks, generous time-off, parental leave, a flexible work model (with some pretty cool offices), and career development resources, all to fuel our employees  passion for travel and ensure a rewarding career journey. We’re building a more open world. Join us.

Introduction to Team:

Expedia Technology teams partner 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.

• 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/Cloud Formation/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

• 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, Cloud Formation) 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, Git Hub Actions, Git Lab CI, or similar)
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives and influence architectural decisions
• Strong communication skills and experience mentoring engineers

• Prior platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure leadership at scale
• Experience with monitoring/observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Open Telemetry, 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…