Software Development Engineer III

Expedia Expedia · Hospitality · Rome, Italy

Software Development Engineer III at Expedia Group, focusing on building and operating mission-critical backend systems for loyalty programs. The role involves designing, building, and operating distributed backend services and APIs that power loyalty features across web and native applications. It requires strong experience in Kotlin/Java, distributed systems, and end-to-end service ownership in high-availability environments. The role emphasizes operational excellence, reliability, and collaboration with product and other engineering teams.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design, build, and operate distributed backend services and GraphQL‑backed experience APIs that power loyalty features across web and native applications.
  2. Lead development efforts on significant features and services, delivering measurable impact across a team, product capability, or technical system.
  3. Design across multiple services, making trade‑offs explicit, owning low‑level system design (LLD), and evolving data models and success metrics within your problem space.
  4. Own always‑available, operationally critical systems, driving how we think about reliability, observability, incident response, security, and cost effectiveness.
  5. Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, mobile and web engineers, data teams, and platform partners to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.

Skills

Required

  • Kotlin
  • Java
  • distributed systems
  • API design
  • GraphQL
  • REST
  • system design
  • implementation
  • testing
  • deployment
  • observability
  • operational support
  • concurrency
  • data modelling
  • performance optimisation
  • failure handling
  • on-call responsibilities

Nice to have

  • building and evolving large-scale backend platforms
  • complex system design
  • navigating ambiguity
  • setting LLD conventions
  • operational excellence
  • defining SLIs/SLOs
  • incident management
  • post-incident reviews
  • continuous improvement
  • cloud-native architectures
  • modern observability tooling
  • AI- or ML-enabled systems
  • AI-driven tools to improve development workflows
  • testing
  • diagnostics
  • productivity
  • collaborating across multiple teams and domains
  • influencing technical decisions

What the JD emphasized

  • mission-critical backend systems
  • operationally critical
  • reliability
  • latency
  • cost efficiency
  • security
  • correctness
  • always-available
  • observability
  • incident response
  • security
  • cost effectiveness
  • high-availability
  • production-critical environments