Senior Backend Engineer - Advertising Tech; AI & Scale

Position: Senior Backend Engineer - Advertising Tech (AI & Scale)
Expedia Group brands power global travel for everyone, everywhere. We design cutting-edge tech to make travel smoother and more memorable, and we create groundbreaking solutions for our partners. Our diverse, vibrant, and welcoming community is essential in driving our success.

Why Join Us?

To shape the future of travel, people must come first. Guided by our Values and Leadership Agreements, we foster an open culture where everyone belongs, differences are celebrated and know that when one of us wins, we all win.

We provide a full benefits package, including exciting travel perks, generous time-off, parental leave, a flexible work model (with some pretty cool offices), and career development resources, all to fuel our employees' passion for travel and ensure a rewarding career journey. We’re building a more open world. Join us.

Introduction to the team Expedia Group Advertising builds the platforms and experiences that connect advertisers with millions of travelers across the globe. Our mission is to help partners reach the right traveler with the right message at the right time — through intuitive advertiser experiences, high-performance ad delivery systems, and intelligent, AI-powered optimization. We are growing our Advertiser Experience engineering team and are looking for a talented, product-minded Software Development Engineer II I who is excited to build thoughtful advertiser-facing experiences and the backend services that power them.

You will help shape the next generation of our advertising marketplace, working at the intersection of user experience, scalable distributed systems, and generative  this role, you will:

Implement backend APIs and services that power high-quality UI experiences and deliver trust, transparency, and performance to our partners

Build and optimize services that support campaign management and optimization across Expedia Group’s advertising network

Improve reliability, scalability, and latency of mission-critical systems

Use LLMs and generative AI to simplify advertiser workflows, improve campaign setup, and automate repetitive tasks

Work with data scientists and ML engineers to integrate personalized recommendations, smart defaults, and AI-assisted decision support

Partner with product managers, UX designers, data scientists, and other engineering teams to deliver measurable advertiser value

Advocate for high-quality code, automated testing, and strong observability practices

Participate in operational reviews and drive continuous improvement

Mentor junior engineers and help elevate the technical bar of the team

Minimum qualifications:

5+ years for Bachelor's degree or 3+ years for Master's in a related technical field; or equivalent related professional experience5 + years of experience in backend software development, working with cloud-based and distributed systems at scale

Proficiency in Java/J2EE, C#, or similar object-oriented languages, with hands-on experience integrating services with relational and No

SQL databases

Experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure/test automation, and delivering features in Agile development environments

Demonstrated experience designing and deploying scalable services in a cloud environment (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP)

Preferred Qualifications:

Exposure to advertising technologies (ad serving, campaign management, RTB, auctions)
Experience working with data-driven systems, ML-powered features, or experimentation platforms

Experience applying generative AI to product experiences and internal tools

Experience contributing to multiple multi-quarter, cross-team projects

A Master's degree in a related technical field

No relocation assistance offered

Please note that this role is only available in the following location:
Chicago in alignment with our flexible work model which requires employees to be in-office at least three days a week. We are unable to offer relocation assistance for this role.

The total cash range for this position in Chicago is $ to $. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $, which is the top of the range, based on ongoing, demonstrated, and sustained performance in the role.

Starting pay for this…