Software Development Engineer III - Back End, GenAI Platform

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.

Introduction to the Team

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 Software Developer III role is part of the GenAI Platform team. The GenAI Platform team builds and operates Expedia Group’s shared generative AI platform - tooling, services, and guardrails - that enable product and ML teams to safely experiment with, deploy, and scale GenAI-powered experiences across our brands. You will design and deliver backend services powering AI capabilities across Expedia Group. You’ll write production code, mentor junior engineers, and drive well-scoped projects from design through delivery. The role blends core software engineering fundamentals with hands-on work in the GenAI stack—RAG pipelines, vector stores, LLM integrations, and platform guardrails.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, test, and operate Python- and FastAPI-based backend services and APIs that power GenAI Platform capabilities, including RAG Manager, RAG Data Plane, and vector store services.

• Implement sound system design (including low-level design), API design, and data modeling for backend services that are reliable, secure, and easy for internal customers to adopt.

• Integrate backend services with LLM providers, Elasticsearch-based vector stores, and Aurora PostgreSQL as part of Expedia Group’s RAG and GenAI platform stack, ensuring robust and observable data and inference flows.

• Contribute to and enhance platform guardrails and safety features such as authentication, API key management, workload-to-workload authorization, evaluation hooks, and monitoring to keep GenAI applications responsible and compliant.

• Safely integrate and operate AI/ML‑enabled solutions, tools, and workflows that improve developer and traveler outcomes, including familiarity with AI‑driven systems and applying foundational AI/ML concepts to real-world platform products.

• Own well-scoped projects end-to-end—from technical design and implementation through rollout, documentation, and post-launch improvements—while mentoring junior engineers and collaborating closely with staff/principal engineers, product managers, and applied scientists.

Minimum Qualifications:

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

• 5+ years of relevant professional experience.

• Proven experience building and operating backend APIs and services in a cloud environment, preferably AWS, including automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, logging, and participation in on-call rotations.

• Strong proficiency in Python and experience with FastAPI or similar web frameworks (such as Flask, Django, or other asynchronous frameworks), with solid understanding of software design principles, data structures, and design patterns.

• Hands-on experience with at least one data store technology (relational, NoSQL, or search), with familiarity using systems like PostgreSQL or Elasticsearch to support service-level data modeling and persistence.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience designing and operating internal platforms, shared services, or SDKs that are consumed by multiple teams, including clear technical documentation (design docs, runbooks, integration guides) and data-driven iteration.

• Prior exposure to or hands-on work with LLM-powered systems and GenAI concepts such as prompting, embeddings, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector stores, and associated evaluation or observability frameworks.

• Demonstrated ability to apply AI/ML and GenAI patterns safely within production services, including implementing and evolving guardrails, evaluations, and operational practices for AI/ML‑enabled solutions at scale.

• Experience with RAG or vector store tooling (for example, LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangGraph) and familiarity with workflow or agent orchestration systems (such as n8n, Flowise, or similar) to integrate AI-driven capabilities into backend service architectures.

• Background working with multiple programming languages and understanding their trade-offs for different backend and data-intensive workloads, with a track record of making pragmatic, data-informed technical decisions.

The total cash range for this position in Chicago is $136,000.00 to $190,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $217,500.00, 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.