Senior Manager, Software Development Engineering

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.

ResponsibilitiesPeople & Team Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing engineering team of backend, data, and MLE engineers.

• Foster a strong engineering culture focused on quality, ownership, reliability, and learning.

• Manage hiring, performance, coaching, and career development.

• Drive clarity, alignment, and collaboration across engineering, data science, and product teams.

Technical Leadership

• Provide technical direction for the hybrid graph-semantic tagging system, including:

• Knowledge graph architecture and taxonomy evolution

• Semantic embedding generation (tags, POIs, review text)

• Hybrid retrieval (graph traversal + semantic search)

• Re-ranking and validation using cross-encoders and LLM-based judges

• Set the vision and roadmap for the platform based on product needs, ML advancements, and scalability requirements.

• Oversee design reviews, system architectures, data modeling, and performance optimizations.

Execution & Delivery

• Own the delivery of reliable, scalable data pipelines that ingest, transform, and enrich billions of data points (reviews, POIs, tags).

• Ensure low-latency and cost-efficient vector search, graph operations, and re-ranking workloads.

• Implement robust deployment patterns for Neo4j or other graph databases, ensuring safe schema evolution and zero-downtime ingestion.

• Drive best practices in observability, automated testing, experiment tracking, and MLOps where applicable.

• Ensure accurate periodic reprocessing of tag-to-POI relationships and continuous improvements to tagging quality.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product to shape the tagging roadmap, including new taxonomy initiatives, improved discovery experiences, and metadata enrichment.

• Collaborate with Data Science and ML teams on model development, embedding strategies, and evaluation metrics.

• Work with infra/platform teams on scaling vector stores, graph databases, and GPU/compute resources.

• Communicate trade-offs, timelines, and technical decisions to stakeholders and leadership.

QualificationsRequired

• 3–6+ years of experience managing engineering teams, with a strong technical background.

• Experience leading teams working on search, recommendation systems, graph technologies, or ML-driven data pipelines.

• Hands-on experience with backend engineering (Python, Java, Scala, or similar).

• Understanding of semantic search concepts: embeddings, vector stores, similarity scoring.

• Experience with ETL/ELT pipelines and distributed data processing.

• Strong systems design, architectural thinking, and technical decision-making.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred

• Experience with knowledge graphs (Neo4j, Neptune, JanusGraph) and graph query patterns.

• Background in search/recommendation: retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, or relevance modeling.

• Familiarity with LLM-based validation or human-in-the-loop workflows.

• Exposure to ML platforms, MLOps, or experiment tracking systems.

• Experience scaling data ingestion for graph or vector systems.

• Strong product intuition for discovery, classification, and metadata quality.

Why Join Us

• Lead a high-impact team working at the intersection of graph systems, semantic search, and ML.

• Solve complex problems around tagging accuracy, coverage, and global scalability.

• Influence the architecture that powers content discovery for millions of travelers.

• Drive innovation in hybrid retrieval, embedding modeling, and knowledge graph evolution.

• Work with highly collaborative teams across Product, DS, ML, and Engineering.

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, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability or age.