Principal Software Development Engineer — Platform & Infrastructure

Principal Software Development Engineer — Platform & Infrastructure

Location:

San Jose, CA (Remote options available)

The Expedia Technology team partners with product teams to build innovative products, services, and tools that create high‑quality experiences for travelers and partners. We are looking for a hands‑on Principal Software Development Engineer to lead the design, implementation, and operational excellence of our cloud infrastructure and platform capabilities. The role focuses on platform engineering: designing and delivering a scalable, reliable, secure, observable, and cost‑efficient runtime platform (Kubernetes, containers, CI/CD, IaC) used by multiple product teams.

• Define technical strategy, roadmap, and standards for cloud infrastructure and platform capabilities (container runtime, orchestration, networking, CI/CD, observability, security, IaC).
• Lead migration and platform adoption efforts (containerization, Kubernetes/EKS, runtime platform) and drive roadmap execution end‑to‑end.
• Actively contribute code and IaC (Terraform/Cloud Formation/Helm, platform services, automation); perform design and code reviews.
• Design scalable, resilient, secure infrastructure patterns for microservices, data stores, caching, and messaging.
• Build and improve CI/CD pipelines, release automation, testing strategies, and safe deployment practices.
• Drive SRE and observability practices: define SLIs/SLOs, monitoring, tracing, alerting, runbooks, incident response, and post‑mortems.
• Lead capacity planning, performance tuning and traffic engineering for high‑scale workloads.
• Own and evangelize AWS cost optimization practices (rightsizing, reserved/spot strategies, architecture changes, cost monitoring).
• Define and enforce platform standards, security controls, environment tagging, and operational excellence practices across teams.
• Mentor senior and mid‑level engineers; identify high‑potential talent and raise engineering standards.
• Collaborate closely with product, security, platform, and operations stakeholders to align technical solutions with business goals and compliance requirements.

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with significant hands‑on experience building and operating distributed cloud services.
• Strong, demonstrable experience building and running platforms on AWS (EKS, ECS, EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS, ELB/ALB, Auto Scaling).
• Deep hands‑on experience with containerization and Kubernetes at scale (EKS or comparable).
• Practical experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Cloud Formation) and Helm charts.
• Proven record of contributing production code and platform automation (languages such as Go, Python, Java, or similar).
• Experience designing for resilience, observability, security and operational automation.
• Familiarity with CI/CD tooling and developer workflows (Spinnaker, Jenkins, Git Hub Actions, Git Lab CI, or similar).
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross‑team technical initiatives and influence architectural decisions.
• Strong communication skills and experience mentoring engineers.

• Prior platform engineering, SRE, or infrastructure leadership at scale.
• Experience with monitoring/observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Open Telemetry, Jaeger).
• Proven experience with AWS cost optimization strategies and tooling (Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, billing APIs).
• Knowledge of service meshes (Istio, Linkerd, VPC Lattice), API gateways, and advanced networking patterns.
• Experience with security/compliance for cloud environments, secrets management, and policy‑as‑code.
• Experience migrating monoliths to cloud‑native architectures.

Base pay range: $ – $. Employees in this role have the potential to increase pay up to $ based on performance.

We offer a comprehensive benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, paid time off, wellness and travel reimbursements, and travel discounts. Additional benefits include an Employee Assistance Program and travel agent membership.

Expedia Group is committed to creating an inclusive work environment with a diverse workforce. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. This employer participates in E-Verify.