Senior Software Development Engineer- Advertising Technology

Expedia Expedia · Hospitality · Seattle, WA

Senior Software Development Engineer to join the Auction and Bidding team, focusing on designing, building, and optimizing high-scale, high-performance, low-latency systems for real-time ad auctions and bidding. The role involves collaborating with Product, Data Science, and ML Engineers on features like relevance optimization and performance modeling, and applying LLMs/generative AI to improve ad delivery and automate tasks. The engineer will also drive operational excellence and mentor junior engineers.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead the design, implementation, and evolution of backend services that power ad auction and bidding capabilities and to serve relevant ads and increase advertiser reach to travelers across our ad platform
  2. Drive operational excellence by improving the reliability, scalability, and latency of mission‑critical services
  3. Lead operational reviews that use data and incident learnings to drive systemic improvements in resilience, fault-tolerance and operational maturity
  4. Partner with Product, Data Scientists, and ML Engineers on features such as relevance optimization, targeting, and performance modeling, using experimentation to validate impact
  5. Apply LLMs and generative AI, where appropriate, to improve ad delivery and automate repetitive tasks at scale

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field with 8+ years of experience, or Master’s degree with 6+ years, or equivalent related professional experience
  • Experience driving the end‑to‑end technical design and delivery of multiple complex, multi‑quarter, cross‑team projects
  • Experience collaborating with product and business partners to identify problems and deliver scalable technical solutions
  • Strong proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Java, Kotlin)
  • Experience building and operating backend services in the cloud using real-time streaming technologies (e.g., Apache Flink/Kafka) and APIs(gRPC/Protobuf)
  • Solid understanding of distributed systems, data flows, and operational best practices
  • Proven track record of driving operational excellence for large‑scale production services (e.g., availability, latency, on‑call ownership, and incident reviews)
  • Experience working with data‑driven systems, Generative AI/ML‑powered features, or experimentation platforms

Nice to have

  • Experience with big data tools and frameworks (e.g., PySpark, Databricks)
  • Experience with advertising technologies (e.g., Ad serving, Auctions, and bidding)

What the JD emphasized

  • high-scale, high-performance, low-latency systems
  • operational excellence
  • Generative AI/ML-powered features

Other signals

  • design, build, and optimize high-scale, high-performance, low-latency systems
  • real-time ad auctions and bidding
  • Apply LLMs and generative AI, where appropriate, to improve ad delivery and automate repetitive tasks at scale
  • Partner with Product, Data Scientists, and ML Engineers on features such as relevance optimization, targeting, and performance modeling