Principal Software Development Engineer (Kubernetes)

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.

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.

In this role, you will:

• 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 GitOps 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

Minimum Qualifications:

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 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 and code quality at a multi-project level.

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.

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.

Benefits and perks

Expedia Group offers benefits and perks designed to support employees and their families, including medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, an Employee Assistance Program, wellness and travel reimbursement, travel discounts, and International Airlines Travel Agent Network (IATAN) membership. Learn more about life at Expedia Group at https://careers.expediggroup.com/life.

Accommodation requests

Expedia Group is committed to providing an inclusive and accessible recruiting experience. If you need an accommodation or adjustment due to a disability during the application or recruiting process, please submit a request at https://expedia.service-now.com/askeg?id=job_accommodation.

About Expedia Group

Expedia Group includes three flagship consumer brands - Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo - along with a leading B2B travel business and travel advertising offerings. Across our brands and business, we help travelers explore the world with confidence and ease.

Important notice

Employment opportunities and job offers at Expedia Group will always come from Expedia Group's Talent Acquisition and hiring teams. Never share sensitive personal information unless you are confident of the recipient. Expedia Group does not extend job offers via email or messaging tools to individuals with whom we have not made prior contact. Our email domain is @expediagroup.com. The official place to find and apply for roles is https://careers.expediagroup.com/jobs/.

Equal Opportunity

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.