Distinguished Software Development Engineer

Expedia Expedia · Hospitality · Seattle, WA

Distinguished Software Development Engineer for Expedia's Multi-Product Shopping team, focusing on defining and leading the technical strategy for the traveler shopping journey across Flights, Cars, Activities, and Packages. The role involves owning the data and machine learning strategy to ensure relevant and personalized results, driving trade-off decisions based on SLOs and business impact, and leading cross-organizational architecture reviews and mentorship.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define and lead the multi-year technical strategy for our Multi-Product Shopping team aligning to our traveler, partner, and business goals.
  2. Partner across multiple business and technical teams to define programs with large value for our Travelers and company and help distill them into 1–5-year plans.
  3. Own our data and machine learning strategy, ensuring that systems return relevant and personalized results and make automated decisions with high accuracy, creating a more delightful travel shopping experience.
  4. Drive clarity on trade-offs (e.g., caching vs. freshness, consistency vs. availability, heuristic vs. model-based decisions), making principled choices rooted in SLOs and measurable business impact.
  5. Lead by example thru cross-org architecture reviews, reference implementations, and design docs/RFCs that unblock multiple teams; provide deep mentorship to Principal and Senior Engineers.

Skills

Required

  • Designing and building large-scale, low-latency systems (tens of thousands of RPS, sub-second P95 goals)
  • ML engineering
  • Cross-team technical leadership
  • Setting engineering standards
  • Mentoring senior and principal engineers
  • Driving complex programs to measurable outcomes
  • Communicating complex business and technical concepts
  • Explaining trade-offs to diverse audiences
  • Driving alignment across engineering, product, data science, and design
  • Developing new ideas and driving them to completion

Nice to have

  • information retrieval expertise

What the JD emphasized

  • 14+ years’ experience in designing and building large-scale, low-latency systems
  • Principal Engineer level for 5+ years
  • Strong ML engineering experience
  • Influence at scale
  • Excellent communicator

Other signals

  • Define and lead the multi-year technical strategy for our Multi-Product Shopping team aligning to our traveler, partner, and business goals.
  • Own our data and machine learning strategy, ensuring that systems return relevant and personalized results and make automated decisions with high accuracy, creating a more delightful travel shopping experience.
  • Drive clarity on trade-offs (e.g., caching vs. freshness, consistency vs. availability, heuristic vs. model-based decisions), making principled choices rooted in SLOs and measurable business impact.