Principal Software Development Engineer - Cloud Platform

At Expedia Group, we help travelers explore the world, one journey at a time. As a global travel company powered by passionate people, trusted partnerships, and leading technology, we connect travelers, partners, and advertisers through our consumer brands, B2B network, and travel advertising business.

Here, you'll do meaningful work that helps millions of people discover, book, and experience travel with more ease, confidence, and joy. Our five Behaviors—Traveler First, Think Big, Operate with Excellence, Ownership Mindset, and Succeed Together—help foster a supportive environment where people can grow their careers and have the flexibility, benefits, and support to do their best work. Join us and build for travelers everywhere.

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 cloud and data provides secure, differentiated, and personalized experiences that drive loyalty and traveler satisfaction.

We are looking for a Principal Engineer to serve as the technical architect for our Cloud Platform organization which sits within our Technology division. As a Principal Engineer reporting to the VP of Cloud Platform, you will be the primary architect of our technical future. The Cloud Platform organization provides the secure, scalable cloud infrastructure, runtime platforms, and developer experience tooling that enable teams across Expedia Group to build, deploy, and operate high-quality, resilient software quickly and safely.

We are seeing an explosion in code volume and service complexity. The goal for this role is to build a platform that can handle this growth without sacrificing reliability or skyrocketing our cloud bill. You’ll be responsible for making sure our architecture is composable, our developer tools are agentic, our Kubernetes footprint is efficient, and our observability stack provides signals, not just noise.

• Lead Architectural Evolution: You’ll own the move toward a Cell-Based Architecture. We need to move away from fragile, monolithic clusters and toward isolated, predictable failure domains that allow us to scale horizontally with confidence.
• Modernize Kubernetes & Infrastructure: You’ll define our K8s strategy, focusing on multi-cluster management, service mesh, and automated scaling. You need to ensure our "Golden Path" makes it easy for engineers to do the right thing by default.
• Hardened Reliability & Observability: You will set the standards for SRE across the org. This means moving beyond basic dashboards to causal observability, automated incident response, and rigorous SLO/SLI management. You’ll help us engineer out the root causes of systemic instability.
• Optimize Cloud Economics: You’ll lead our Fin Ops technical strategy. You need to build the tooling and visibility that allows us to understand cost-per-service and ensures our infrastructure spend is directly tied to business value.
• Support the Developer Workflow: While we are embracing AI tools, your job is to build the underlying "agent-friendly" infrastructure. This includes standardized Dev Containers and ephmeral environments that allow for fast, isolated iteration without clobbering shared state.

• Extensive professional software development experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, cloud-native distributed systems and platform services on Kubernetes.
• Proven ownership of critical services or multi-service platforms, including responsibility for system design (LLD), API design, data modeling, deployment, and ongoing operational health.
• Deep expertise with at least one major public cloud provider and core platform technologies (compute, networking, storage, service discovery, security, observability, and CI/CD).
• Demonstrated ability to make high-impact architectural decisions, navigate complex trade-offs, and guide multiple teams toward coherent, long-term technical direction.
• Familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and…