Senior Manager, Software Development Engineering: Lodging Booking Platform

Expedia Expedia · Hospitality · Austin, TX

Senior Manager, Software Development Engineering for Expedia's Lodging Booking Platform. This role leads engineering teams in building and evolving scalable, cloud-native reservation systems on AWS. The focus is on distributed systems, high-volume transactions, and integrating AI/ML-enabled solutions to improve outcomes, though AI is not the core craft of the role itself. The platform is critical to Expedia's revenue.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead multiple software engineering teams building and evolving services and platforms that power the Lodging Booking Platform, ensuring reliability, scalability, and high performance across global traffic patterns.
  2. Define, communicate, and drive a clear technical vision and roadmap for lodging booking services, including system design, API design, and data modeling aligned with product and architecture strategies.
  3. Establish and enforce engineering best practices for design, coding, testing, observability, security, and operational readiness, while continuously improving build, deployment, and release processes.
  4. Partner closely with product, architecture, and other platform and feature teams to deliver cross-domain initiatives, enabling reuse and fungibility of services and capabilities across multiple lines of business.
  5. Build, mentor, and grow a diverse, high-performing engineering organization through coaching, performance management, and effective hiring, while fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and psychological safety.

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
  • Extensive professional software development experience, including significant time leading engineers or teams delivering complex, distributed backend systems or platforms in a production environment.
  • Proven track record owning end-to-end delivery and operations of critical services or multi-service platforms, including system design (LLD), API design, data modeling, and operational excellence (monitoring, alerting, incident response).
  • Strong technical leadership skills with hands-on depth in one or more modern programming languages, service-oriented or microservices architectures, and cloud-native technologies and tooling.
  • Demonstrated ability to align engineering execution with product and business priorities, managing trade-offs to deliver high-quality outcomes at scale.

Nice to have

  • Experience leading multiple software engineering teams or an organization responsible for large-scale, high-throughput transactional systems such as booking, payments, or similar mission-critical platforms.
  • Demonstrated success defining and evolving technical architecture for a complex platform, including cross-service contracts, domain modeling, and data strategies that enable resilience, scalability, and reuse.
  • Strong background driving operational excellence at scale, including reliability engineering, capacity planning, cost optimization, and data-driven decision making using metrics and experimentation.
  • Experience safely integrating AI/ML‑enabled capabilities into production services (for example, personalization, ranking, anomaly detection, or intelligent automation), and guiding teams on responsible, effective use of AI-driven tools in the software development lifecycle.
  • Familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real world products, with the ability to identify pragmatic use cases within lodging booking an

What the JD emphasized

  • critical to Expedia Group’s business revenue
  • high-volume transactional environments
  • end-to-end delivery and operations of critical services or multi-service platforms
  • large-scale, high-throughput transactional systems
  • mission-critical platforms