Location: Seattle preferred; other locations and employment arrangement to be confirmed
About Layla AILayla is an AI-native travel-planning and booking company within Expedia Group's Product organization. The team is building conversational experiences that help travelers move from inspiration to a complete, bookable itinerary across flights, hotels, activities, and day-by-day plans.
The team is small, senior, and startup-paced. Engineers are expected to take meaningful ownership, move from ambiguous problem to production, and use data, experimentation, and AI-assisted development practices to improve the traveler experience.
THE OPPORTUNITYWe are looking for a
Senior Full Stack Agentic AI Engineer to help build the next generation of proactive travel-planning experiences at Layla.
You will work across agent orchestration, backend services, data and retrieval systems, and user-facing product experiences. You will help turn emerging agentic capabilities into reliable, understandable, and useful traveler workflows - not simply prototypes or chat interfaces.
This is a high-autonomy, broad-scope senior individual contributor role - often described as a
"Super IC" profile - with the opportunity to connect product intent, agent architecture, full-stack implementation, and production outcomes. The role has shared ownership: you will help shape direction and own meaningful work while partnering closely across Product, Design, Data, and Engineering rather than working in isolation.
At Layla, engineers can influence a product used by travelers around the world. We are looking for someone energized by the opportunity to bring ideas forward, explore possibilities, and turn them into reliable experiences at global travel scale. You do not need to arrive with every answer or every technology; curiosity, sound judgment, initiative, and a willingness to learn are essential.
WHAT WE VALUE BEYOND THE CHECKLISTThe scope of this role is intentionally broad, but it is not a request for one person to be an expert in everything. We value engineers who can connect disciplines, identify where they can contribute most, collaborate generously, and bring in the right partners when deeper expertise is needed. Strong candidates may have different paths through full-stack engineering, applied AI, product development, or startup environments; what matters is the ability to learn, make sound tradeoffs, and turn ideas into outcomes.
In this role, you will:- Design, build, and operate agentic AI experiences that support travel discovery, itinerary planning, personalization, and booking-related workflows.
- Develop reliable agent orchestration patterns, including planning, tool use, routing, state management, memory, retries, guardrails, and human confirmation where appropriate.
- Build and evolve backend services, APIs, data models, integrations, and event-driven workflows that connect agent experiences to Expedia Group and Layla capabilities.
- Build user-facing experiences that make AI behavior clear, useful, and actionable across web and other relevant product surfaces.
- Integrate retrieval, knowledge, and recommendation capabilities using appropriate data contracts, embeddings, search, ranking, and grounding strategies.
- Establish evaluation and observability practices for agentic systems, including quality, task completion, latency, cost, safety, failure modes, and user impact.
- Take shared ownership of a meaningful product surface, from framing the problem and exploring solutions through implementation, launch, measurement, and iteration.
- Translate ambiguous product opportunities into thin, testable increments and ship quickly while preserving operational and architectural quality.
- Partner closely with Product, Design, Data, and Engineering to shape product direction, define success metrics, and connect technical decisions to traveler outcomes.
- Apply strong software engineering practices across testing, CI/CD, observability, security, incident response, and production support.
- Use AI-assisted engineering tools thoughtfully to explore designs, accelerate implementation, improve test coverage, and investigate production behavior - while retaining full accountability for the code and systems shipped.
- Mentor teammates and raise the quality bar through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, reusable patterns, and hands-on technical leadership.
How you will make an impact:- Ship production agentic workflows that solve real traveler problems from inspiration through itinerary creation and, where applicable, booking at Expedia Group scale.
- Improve the reliability and observability of multi-step AI workflows so the team can understand quality, failure modes, latency, and cost.
- Establish reusable patterns for agent tools, contracts, evaluation, guardrails, and production operations.
- Partner with Product and Design to turn traveler feedback and experimentation results into better AI experiences.
- Increase the team's ability to deliver safely and quickly through clear architecture, strong engineering practices, and practical use of AI-assisted development.
Ways of working:- Own outcomes with others. Start with the traveler or business problem and work backward to the simplest useful solution, bringing partners in early.
- Bring ideas forward. Contribute hypotheses, product ideas, and technical possibilities - then test them thoughtfully with users, data, and teammates.
- Move quickly with judgment. Make progress in ambiguity while being explicit about risks, assumptions, and tradeoffs.
- Build for trust. Make AI behavior understandable, measurable, recoverable, and appropriately constrained.
- Stay hands-on and collaborative. Seniority means technical ownership and leverage, while recognizing that the strongest outcomes come from shared expertise.
- Learn in public. Share context, document decisions, and create patterns that help a small team move faster.
WHAT YOU BRINGMinimum Qualifications:- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including experience delivering production systems end to end.
- Demonstrated experience building and operating full-stack applications, with meaningful depth in backend services and modern web or product-facing interfaces.
- Professional experience integrating LLMs or AI/ML capabilities into production products, workflows, or platforms.
- Experience with agentic patterns such as tool-using agents, multi-step workflows, orchestration, RAG, function calling, structured outputs, or human-in-the-loop systems.
- Strong programming ability in at least one backend language such as Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, or TypeScript, plus experience contributing to a modern frontend stack.
- Experience designing APIs, services, data models, integrations, automated tests, and production monitoring.
- Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly and collaborate effectively with product, design, data, and engineering partners.
Preferred Qualifications:- Experience building AI agents or assistants that take actions through tools, APIs, or business workflows rather than only generating conversational responses.
- Experience with agent orchestration or evaluation frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, OpenAI or Anthropic tooling, or comparable systems.
- Experience with retrieval and knowledge systems, including vector search, hybrid search, embeddings, reranking, grounding, and data-quality controls.
- Experience with streaming or real-time AI interactions, conversational interfaces, or multi-step user experiences.
- Experience with React, TypeScript, Next.js, GraphQL, or comparable frontend technologies.
- Experience with Python, FastAPI, Java/Kotlin services, REST or GraphQL APIs, event-driven architecture, and cloud-native systems.
- Experience designing agent evaluation frameworks, offline test sets, online monitoring, quality rubrics, or experimentation programs.
- Experience building systems with strong safety, privacy, security, reliability, and responsible-AI considerations.
- Experience in travel, commerce, marketplace, recommendations, search, personalization, or other high-scale consumer products.
- Experience using AI coding assistants or software-engineering agents in day-to-day development, including examples of validating, correcting, and hardening generated output.
- Experience working in a startup, incubation, or rapidly evolving product environment where priorities and requirements change quickly.
Expedia Group is proud to offer a wide range of benefits to support employees and their families, including medical/dental/vision, paid time off, and an Employee Assistance Program. To fuel each employee's passion for travel, we offer a wellness & travel reimbursement, travel discounts, and an International Airlines Travel Agent (IATAN) membership. View our full list of benefits.
The total cash range for this position in Seattle is $184,500.00 to $258,000.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $295,000.00, 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 Austin is $184,500.00 to $258,000.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $295,000.00, 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.
