Principal UX Designer - AI Incubation Lab

Principal UX Designer - AI Incubation Lab

Expedia Group builds end-to-end experiences that millions of travelers, partners, and employees rely on every day. Within the Design team, we're reimagining how people discover and book trips across , Vrbo, and Brand Expedia. We're looking for a Principal UX Designer for incubation, helping explore the possibilities that AI opens in the space of travel and transfer that knowledge into current products.

In this position, you'll be a part of a small prototype-oriented team that helps explore different futures and initiatives to inform Expedia's key strategies. You will work autonomously and will balance strategic thinking with the ability to produce tangible artifacts and conduct evaluations as well as share learnings.

In this role, you will:

• Lead the end-to-end vision, strategy, and UX design execution for AI-driven incubation projects that inform the future of travel across Expedia Group brands.
• Explore, define, and prototype novel AI-powered product experiences, creating experiential artifacts that bring ambiguous opportunities to life for travelers, partners, and internal teams.
• Design and iterate conceptual, visual, and interaction patterns that evolve the Expedia brand experience in response to emerging AI capabilities and future customer needs.
• Produce tangible prototypes and experiments, including "vibe-coded" or coded artifacts, to evaluate ideas with users and stakeholders and to inform strategic decisions.
• Collaborate closely with a small cross-functional incubation team to transform early concepts into higher-fidelity experiences and potential customer-facing experiments, safely integrating AI/ML-enabled solutions that improve outcomes.
• Synthesize and communicate key insights, learnings, and design directions through compelling storytelling to senior leaders and peers, transferring knowledge into current product teams and fostering a fast-paced culture of AI-first innovation.

Minimum Qualifications:

• 12+ years of experience in product or UX design, including substantial experience shipping high-quality digital products or services at scale.
• Bachelor's degree or higher in a related field (Design, Human‑Computer Interaction, User Experience or similar), or equivalent relevant experience. Relevant academic qualifications that help grow the team's knowledge or expertise are welcomed but not required.
• Proven ability to take ambiguous, technically complex opportunities and translate them into clear, inspiring, and testable AI-powered product experiences and prototypes.
• Demonstrated expertise in interaction, visual, and systems-level experience design, including creating experiential artifacts (prototypes, coded demos, or similar) that guide strategic product decisions.
• Strong communication and storytelling skills with a track record of influencing cross-functional stakeholders and leadership in a highly collaborative environment.
• Familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real world products, including integrating AI capabilities into end-to-end customer journeys.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience leading incubation, exploratory, or zero-to-one design initiatives that shaped long-term product or portfolio strategy in a complex ecosystem.
• Background designing and evaluating AI-assisted or AI-first user experiences, including responsible application of AI/ML capabilities to improve decision making, automation, or personalization.
• Demonstrated ability to safely integrate and operate AI/ML-enabled solutions that improve customer and business outcomes, including partnering with product and engineering to define guardrails and evaluation criteria.
• Proven success crafting and evolving design languages, pattern libraries, or interaction models to accommodate emerging AI-driven behaviors across multiple products or brands.
• Depth in creating and running higher-fidelity prototypes and experiments (including data- or behavior-informed prototypes) to validate AI-centric concepts, and demonstrated experience taking products from concept to scaled adoption.