Principal Software Development Engineer - Business to Agent

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 is essential in driving our success.

Why Join Us? 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 know that 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, all to fuel our employees' passion for travel and ensure a rewarding career journey. We’re building a more open world. Join us.

We create and deliver tailored marketing strategies for Expedia Group’s brands, focusing on establishing strong connections and cohesive experiences for travelers and partners. We leverage our functional expertise and creative excellence to build trust and loyalty for our brands through innovative marketing approaches and technology.

At Expedia Group, we’re entering a new era where AI agents become a primary interface between travellers and brands, reshaping how intent, search, evaluation, and booking happen end‑to‑end. We were early in this space with our early investments, and we’re extending that foundation into a dedicated marketing capability focused on influencing agents across the full travel funnel.

This role will be part of an AI‑native team that sits at the intersection of marketing, AI, and large‑scale platforms. We build the systems that make Expedia Group’s supply, pricing, and brand legible, accessible, and preferred by horizontal agents, agent browsers, co‑workers, and emerging agent surfaces.

If you’re excited to define how Expedia Group shows up to AI agents and build the systems that make us the number one AI agent marketer in travel, this role is for you.

In this role, you will: Set technical vision for agentic marketing and own the outcomes

• Lead technical vision and own the target architecture for the agentic marketing platform - spanning data, services, workflows, experimentation, third-party APIs, and agent-facing surfaces - partnering closely with the agentic search lead, who owns channel strategy and outcomes.

• Translate the agentic search strategy and investment roadmap into a sequenced, opinionated engineering plan with clear trade‑offs and success criteria.

• Partner with product, marketing, data science, SEO/AEO, and architecture leaders to align on priorities, interfaces, and ownership boundaries.

• Work cross functionally with many internal and external teams to deliver outcomes with proven ability to influence without direct authority.

Build agent legibility & access

• Design and ship systems that make EG content, reliably machine‑readable and preferred for different agent archetypes (horizontal agents, agentic commerce, browsers, co‑workers).

• Extend marketing surfaces beyond traditional web indices into agent‑specific indices, model training data, live retrieval, and memory infrastructure.

• Create and evolve products designed for specific agent archetypes and crawlers - including agent-specific surfaces, indices, and CLIs.

• Build 0-to-1: stand up the first measurement, agent-observability, data/content, and agent-specific products (CLIs, indices, agents).

• Architect engineering workflows around fleets of autonomous coding agents and sub-agents, treating orchestration of agent labor - not just personal output - as the core leverage model.

• Ensure high‑quality Agent Access via APIs, MCPs, feeds, and other integration points, including authorization, observability, and SLOs.

• Lead the design of observability and experimentation to understand how agents reason (e.g., chain‑of‑thought logging, ranking signals, bias analysis).

Anchor a small and focused engineering squad

• Serve as the technical anchor for a small, ring‑fenced squad (STL + engineers), setting engineering standards, reviewing designs, and making crisp architectural calls while working closely with the broader engineering team.

• Coach and mentor engineers across Marketing Tech and adjacent orgs, raising the bar on system design, AI integration, experimentation, and operational excellence.

• Foster an AI‑native, zero‑coordination tax culture that uses automation and agents to amplify output and move quickly, with failure as a design principle.

• Ensure systems are observable, resilient, secure, and cost‑efficient, with clear SLOs and runbooks.

• Operate with a highly discretionary build budget - pre-approved token consumption, AI vendor adoption, and unconventional experimentation (e.g., dedicated hardware for synthetic agent-log generation) - and spend it to maximize speed.

Minimum qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience (or 6+ with a Master’s)

• Hands-on experience with agentic / AI systems (LLMs, RAG, tools/MCPs, agent orchestration)

• Demonstrated expertise in systems architecture, API design, and integrating third-party products and platforms

• Product sense, ability to reason about what to build and for whom, prioritize on desirability / feasibility / viability, and partner with product as a peer

• Strong proficiency in at least one modern backend language (e.g., Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Scala) and comfort working across services, data, and infrastructure

• Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and container orchestration (Kubernetes), plus modern CI/CD and observability tooling

• Solid understanding of data modelling, streaming/batch processing, and experimentation frameworks

• Has architected scalable, high traffic services that translate a product vision into an end to end technical system

• Practical experience with AI developer tools (e.g., Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Codex, Kiro), including evaluating adoption, usage depth, and impact on developer workflows and outcomes.

• Strong cross‑functional collaboration skills: able to partner with marketing, product, data science, architecture, and legal to make high‑quality trade‑offs

• Experience mentoring senior engineers, building healthy engineering cultures, and influencing without formal authority

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience with marketing technology, ad platforms, or growth/optimization stacks

• Active immersion in the AI ecosystem – relationships with frontier labs, agent platforms, or AI-native startups treated as a meaningful signal of genuine engagement, not just familiarity.

• Familiarity with AI/ML in production—model integration patterns, evaluation, safety guardrails

• Comfort operating in pre‑playbook spaces where hypotheses will be wrong, experiments will fail, and rapid iteration is required

• Proven ability to translate ambiguous strategy into executable technical roadmaps, balancing near‑term delivery with long‑term architecture

The total cash range for this position in Seattle is $231,000.00 to $323,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $369,500.00, which is the top of the range, based on ongoing, demonstrated, and sustained performance in the role.

Starting pay for this role will vary based on multiple factors, including location, available budget, and an individual’s knowledge, skills, and experience. Pay ranges may be modified in the future.

Expedia Group is proud to offer a wide range of benefits to support employees and their families, including medical/dental/vision, paid time off, and an Employee Assistance Program. To fuel each employee’s passion for travel, we offer a wellness & travel reimbursement, travel discounts, and an International Airlines Travel Agent (IATAN) membership. View our full list of benefits.

Accommodation requests If you need assistance with any part of the application or recruiting process due to a disability, or other physical or mental health conditions, please reach out to our Recruiting Accommodations Team through the Accommodation Request.

We are proud to be named as a Best Place to Work on Glassdoor in 2024 and be recognized for award-winning culture by organizations like Forbes, TIME, Disability:IN, and others.

Expedia Group's family of brands includes: Brand Expedia®, Hotels.com®, Expedia® Partner Solutions, Vrbo®, trivago®, Orbitz®, Travelocity®, Hotwire®, Wotif®, ebookers®, CheapTickets®, Expedia Group™ Media Solutions, Expedia Local Expert®, CarRentals.com™, and Expedia Cruises™. © 2024 Expedia, Inc. All rights reserved. Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners. CST: 2029030-50

Employment opportunities and job offers at Expedia Group will always come from Expedia Group’s Talent Acquisition and hiring teams. Never provide sensitive, personal information to someone unless you’re confident who the recipient is. Expedia Group does not extend job offers via email or any other messaging tools to individuals with whom we have not made prior contact. Our email domain is @expediagroup.com. The official website to find and apply for job openings at Expedia Group is careers.expediagroup.com/jobs.

Expedia 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, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. This employer participates in E-Verify. The employer will provide the Social Security Administration (SSA) and, if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with information from each new employee's I-9 to confirm work authorization.