Principal Software Development Engineer - Loyalty

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.

Expedia Technology teams partner with our Product teams 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. 

The Loyalty Engineering organization powers continuous engagement, re-engagement, and re-acquisition for travelers worldwide. We build the systems that create a durable growth flywheel for Expedia , deepening traveler relationships while driving measurable business impact across brands and markets.

In this role, you will lead the technical strategy and architecture for the AI-empowered Loyalty charter — designing and delivering next-generation, intelligent engagement experiences powered by modern AI and agentic systems. You will drive system design across multiple distributed engineering teams, partnering closely with Product, Data Science, and platform leaders to build scalable, reliable, and innovative solutions.

This role requires deep hands-on technical leadership, strong architectural judgment, and the ability to influence across teams without direct authority.

In this role, you will:

• Lead the architectural vision, design, and delivery of complex software solutions across multiple technical domains to enable AI powered loyalty offers and more.

• Drive system design, API development, and data modeling to ensure secure, maintainable, and high-performing platforms.

• Guide and mentor engineering teams, fostering technical excellence and innovation across projects and domains.

• Safely integrate and operate AI/ML-enabled solutions that improve outcomes, championing best practices in responsible AI deployment.

• Optimize operational excellence by implementing robust software development practices and scalable engineering processes.

• Collaborate with cross-functional partners to deliver resilient, business-aligned technology solutions and support continuous improvement.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field; or equivalent related professional experience.

• 12+ years of relevant professional experience.

• Demonstrated expertise in large-scale system architecture, technical decision making, and delivery of complex multi-domain solutions.

• Hands-on experience designing, building, and shipping AI-powered products using LLMs in production environments.

• Experience architecting agentic systems (multi-step reasoning, tool use, orchestration frameworks, memory, evaluation loops)

• Experience integrating AI systems into scalable, high-availability platforms with real-time decisioning requirements

• Deep expertise in distributed systems design, APIs, event-driven architectures, and scalable backend systems.

• Experience building personalization, experimentation, recommendation, loyalty, or growth platforms at scale

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; able to articulate complex AI and architectural concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Builds alignment across teams without formal authority

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience leading architectural transformation and modernization initiatives for large, distributed systems.

• Experience in loyalty, personalization, offers, growth platforms, fintech, or consumer-scale products is strongly preferred.

• Strong understanding of modern AI system design patterns including RAG, embeddings, vector search, prompt orchestration, model evaluation, and observability

• Expertise in full stack engineering with proven ability to operate across multiple technical domains and platforms.

• Track record of championing data-driven decision making and operational excellence for mission-critical systems.

• Deep understanding of safely scaling AI/ML-enabled solutions, including risk mitigation and ethical considerations.

• Strong judgment in making trade-offs between innovation, speed, scalability, and reliability

The total cash range for this position in San Jose is $249,000.00 to $348,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $398,500.00, 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.