Principal Software Development Engineer; Kubernetes

Why Join Us?

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 drives our success.

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 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 to fuel employees’ passion for travel and ensure a rewarding career journey.

Our Technology Team partners with teams across Expedia Group to create innovative products, services, and tools that deliver high‑quality experiences for travelers, partners, and our employees. A singular technology platform powered by data and machine learning provides secure, differentiated, and personalized experiences that drive loyalty and traveler satisfaction.

As a Principal Engineer you will be part of an agile development team with extensive Linux, cloud, and containerization experience. You will play a key role in crafting the strategic technical goals for our group and lead the architecture, design, and building of a compute runtime platform based on Kubernetes used by all engineering teams across Expedia.

• Design and implement core platform components: evolve our Kubernetes‑based environment focusing on multi‑tenancy, network policy, resource management, and service mesh integration (e.g., Istio, Linkerd).
• Architect for scale and reliability: lead the technical design for scaling our control plane and data plane to handle a 10× increase in services and traffic; define and implement SLOs for the platform.
• Improve the developer control plane: design and build the next generation of CI/CD pipelines and Git Ops workflows; drive strategy for our internal developer portal (e.g., Backstage) to unify tooling, documentation, and service lifecycle management.
• Automate infrastructure lifecycle: author and maintain production‑grade IaC using Terraform and/or Crossplane; eliminate manual toil by automating cluster provisioning, node lifecycle, and dependency upgrades.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship: mentor senior engineers, lead architecture review sessions, and author RFCs to build consensus on technical decisions.
• Serve as the final escalation point for complex production incidents involving the underlying platform, from kernel‑level issues to CNI bugs to distributed system failures.
• Collaborate across product management, architecture, and engineering leads to deliver high‑capacity capabilities for our developer community.
• Explore and use a wide variety of technologies and tools such as Java, Go, AWS, Docker, Hashi Corp tools (Terraform, Consul, Vagrant, Vault, Nomad), Kubernetes, Argo, Istio, Helm, etc.
• Advocate for operational excellence, including unit testing, establishing SLAs, and programming for resiliency and scalability.
• Take ownership of high‑stress scenarios by remaining calm and employing critical thinking and data‑driven decision‑making practices.

• 8+ years of experience in infrastructure automation, configuration management, or container orchestration.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Strong programming skills in one or more languages:
  Java, Go, Python, or Ruby.
• Experience in cloud computing with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and containerization with Docker and Kubernetes/EKS.

• Experience with stateless and stateful workloads, service mesh or service discovery, monitoring, alerting, and logging.
• Understanding of security development principles such as token management, encryption, and certificates.
• Experience with continuous integration tools like Jenkins or similar.
• Experience building self‑service technology platform capabilities, particularly in the…