Software Development Engineer III - Backend

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.

Role summary
Expedia Technology teams partner with the Product teams to create innovative products and services, delivering high-quality experiences for travelers & partners. A singular technology platform powered by data and machine learning provides secure, differentiated, and personalized experiences that drive loyalty and traveler satisfaction.
The Air Reservations team is seeking a highly motivated backend Software Engineer to own and develop highly scalable, reliable services that form the core engine for flight bookings. These services sit at the intersection of airline supply and traveler demand and are mission-critical to enabling travelers to book and service their flights across Expedia's global platform. If you thrive on building systems that process millions of transactions every month across hundreds of airline suppliers — where reliability and performance directly impact traveler experience — we want you to join our team!

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, test, and deliver reliable software solutions for a domain or set of services, using strong coding, low-level design, API design, and data modeling practices.

• Own technical execution for complex initiatives, breaking down ambiguous problems into scalable solutions that meet product, engineering, and operational goals.

• Contribute to architecture and design decisions across services, driving maintainability, performance, resilience, and secure engineering practices in production environments.

• Partner effectively with engineers, product, and cross-functional stakeholders to deliver outcomes, improve development efficiency, and support fungibility across multiple technical domains.

• Improve operational excellence by monitoring service health, resolving production issues, strengthening observability, and using data to guide quality, reliability, and performance improvements.

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

Minimum Qualifications:

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

• 5+ years of relevant professional experience

• Demonstrated ownership of a service or multiple services within a domain, with responsibility for delivery, quality, and operational performance.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including coding, low-level system design, API design, data modeling, testing, debugging, and secure development practices.

• Experience working across the software development lifecycle in distributed systems or service-oriented environments, with sound judgment in technical tradeoff decisions.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Background in building backend services in Java (Spring/Spring Boot or equivalent), including REST/gRPC (Protobuf) APIs, and components that are secure, scalable, and maintainable.

• Experience with databases (SQL and NoSQL), query design and optimization, and data modeling for backend services.

• Experience leading technical design for complex service enhancements or new capabilities within a domain, including scalable architecture, resilient APIs, and effective data models.

• Operational excellence mindset, with demonstrated experience in incident management, root-cause analysis (RCA), and improving reliability and availability metrics.

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies, comprehensive automated testing with strong code coverage, and code review practices.

• Exposure to cloud platforms (preferably AWS) and container/orchestration technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).

• Experience with messaging and streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, SQS) and asynchronous processing patterns.

• Background in e-commerce or other high-availability transactional systems is a plus.

The total cash range for this position in Seattle is $146,000.00 to $204,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $233,500.00, 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.