Principal Software Development Engineer; Kubernetes

Principal Software Development Engineer (Kubernetes, AWS)

Our Technology Team partners with teams across Expedia Group to create innovative products, services, and tools to 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 lots of Linux, cloud, and containerization experience. You will play a key role in crafting the strategic technical goals for our group. The main effort will involve leading the architecture, design and building a compute runtime platform based on Kubernetes that will be used by all engineering teams across Expedia.

You will provide technical leadership for a dynamic and growing engineering organization. You will work alongside a talented group of product managers and other technical leaders to deliver best‑in‑class capabilities to our Expedia developer community, and as a result help shape the future of online travel.

• Design and Implement Core Platform Components:
  Evolve our Kubernetes-based environment, focusing on areas like 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 10x increase in services and traffic. Define and implement SLOs for the platform itself.
• Improve the Developer Control Plane:
  Design and build the next generation of our CI/CD pipelines and Git Ops workflows. Drive the 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 Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and/or Crossplane. Eliminate manual toil by automating cluster provisioning, node lifecycle, and dependency upgrades.
• Technical Leadership and Mentorship:
  Act as a force multiplier. Mentor senior engineers on the team, lead architecture review sessions, and author RFCs to build consensus on significant technical decisions. Your influence will extend beyond the team to application developers and SREs.
• Production Debugging:
  Serve as the final escalation point for complex, cross-cutting production incidents that involve the underlying platform, from kernel-level issues to CNI bugs to distributed system failures.
• Collaborate across product management, architecture, and engineering leads to deliver capabilities that enable our developer community to function at a high capacity.
• Ability to explore/use a wide variety of technologies and tools such as (but are not limited to) Java, Go, AWS, Docker, Hashicorp tools (Terraform, Consul, Vagrant, Vault, Nomad), Kubernetes, Argo, Istio, Helm, etc.
• Advocate for operational excellence (such as unit testing, establishing SLAs, programming for resiliency and scalability).
• Take ownership of high stress scenarios by remaining calm, 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 container compute, traffic management, or API management spaces.
• Experience mentoring other engineers and establishing standards for operational excellence…