Software Development Engineer II

Expedia Expedia · Hospitality · Seattle, WA

Software Development Engineer II role at Expedia Group, focusing on building and optimizing high-performance C++ systems for their flight search platform. The role involves designing, developing, testing, and maintaining backend services, with a strong emphasis on C++ proficiency, system design, and operational excellence. While the team leverages machine learning and aims to integrate AI-enabled capabilities, the core responsibility of this role is in traditional software engineering for a large-scale consumer product.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design, develop, test, and maintain services and components, with a focus on clean API design, robust data modeling, and reliable system behavior
  2. Implement high‑quality, well‑tested C++ code; participate in code reviews; and help improve engineering standards, tooling, and best practices across the team
  3. Collaborate closely with product, design, and partner engineering teams to deliver features end‑to‑end, balancing technical quality with delivery timelines
  4. Work across multiple services or components within a domain, helping to diagnose production issues, improve performance, and contribute to operational excellence
  5. Use telemetry and diagnostics (metrics, logs, tracing, profiling tools, experimentation frameworks) to understand system behavior, troubleshoot issues, and make data‑informed decisions

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field; or equivalent related professional experience
  • 2+ years of relevant professional software engineering experience
  • Professional software development experience with ownership of services or components within a broader system
  • Proficiency in C++
  • Hands-on experience in API design
  • Hands-on experience in data modeling
  • Hands-on experience in system design
  • Experience building, testing, deploying, and operating backend or full-stack services in production environments
  • Participation in on-call or incident response rotations
  • Solid foundation in algorithms
  • Solid foundation in data structures
  • Solid foundation in object-oriented design

Nice to have

  • Experience building high-performance, production-grade C++ systems
  • Interest in performance optimization
  • Interest in memory efficiency
  • Interest in concurrency
  • Interest in reliability at scale
  • Strong foundation in systems design
  • Strong foundation in API development
  • Designing maintainable interfaces
  • Designing data models
  • Improving existing architectures within complex distributed environments
  • Demonstrated experience improving engineering quality
  • Working with large codebases
  • Refactoring legacy code
  • Optimizing performance-critical paths
  • Strengthening observability
  • Advancing testing and operational practices
  • Experience using telemetry and diagnostics (metrics, logs, tracing, profiling tools, experimentation frameworks) to analyze system behavior
  • Experience troubleshooting complex issues
  • Experience driving data-informed technical decisions
  • Exposure to integrating intelligent or AI-enabled capabilities into backend systems
  • Interest in leveraging emerging technologies to enhance system performance and developer productivity

What the JD emphasized

  • Proficiency in C++ is a must
  • Experience building, testing, deploying, and operating backend or full‑stack services in production environments