Principal Software Development Engineer - Platform & InfrastructureIntroduction 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.
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 perksExpedia 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.
