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Principal Software Development Engineer - Business to Agent

Expedia

Washington - Seattle Campus, US$231k – $324konsite

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About this role

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.

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 workflow

Salary insight

The midpoint of this range ($277k) is about 70% above the median disclosed salary for Seattle roles listed on ForgeApply ($163k across 1,511 jobs).

Based on live postings with disclosed pay on ForgeApply; refreshed daily. Not an estimate of this employer's offer.

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