Software Development Engineer III - Full Stack (Back end heavy)

Software Development Engineer III - Full Stack (Back end heavy)

About the Team

The Landing Pages Engineering team (formerly Acquisition Landing Engineering / ALE) is responsible for crafting the first impression for millions of travelers arriving at Expedia Group brands — powering nearly 40% of EG's inbound traffic across SEO, SEM, Metasearch, and Agentic (AEO) channels. From Destination Landing Pages to Dateless Property Detail experiences, we build engaging, contextual, and high-performance landing experiences across BEX, Hotels.com, Vrbo, and Comet that seamlessly guide users into the shopping funnel.

The search landscape is shifting — and we're shifting with it. AI-native search is transforming how travelers discover and plan travel. The rise of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — powered by platforms like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity — is fundamentally changing consumer behavior. Travelers now ask long, conversational, intent-rich questions (averaging 23 words vs. 4 in traditional search), and expect instant, grounded answers rather than a list of blue links. Traditional SEO traffic is declining, while AI search sessions are growing at 165x the rate of organic traffic and are expected to surpass traditional search visitors by 2028. We are at the forefront of this shift — rebuilding how users interact with landing pages to make our content AI-discoverable, semantically rich, and optimized for citation in AI-generated responses. We're evolving static, template-driven pages into adaptive, intent-responsive experiences that understand traveler context and dynamically compose the right content at the right time — whether the visitor is a human or an AI agent.

We're looking for a motivated, technically deep, and backend-leaning full-stack engineer who thrives on building high-throughput services, designing clean APIs, and pushing production systems toward operational excellence — while also being comfortable contributing to modern frontend experiences. You'll be joining a team that isn't just maintaining landing pages — we're reimagining them for the AI-native era of travel. At Expedia, we believe in being thinker-doers - we are Makers.

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and evolve complex, customer-facing and platform services across the landing stack using full-stack technologies — with a focus on system design (LLD), API design, and data modeling that adhere to Expedia Group engineering standards.

• Lead end-to-end technical execution of multi-service features across frontend, backend, and data layers — ensuring high availability, performance, security, and resilience in production environments, with a strong bias toward backend architecture and service reliability.

• Drive technical direction within your area by defining implementation approaches, reviewing designs and code for other engineers, and promoting best practices in testing, observability, CI/CD, and operational excellence

• Collaborate closely with product, design, and cross-functional engineering teams to translate business and customer problems into scalable technical solutions, using data and experimentation to guide decisions that impact traffic, bounce rate, conversion, and page performance.

• Safely integrate and operate AI/ML-enabled solutions that improve outcomes — such as content personalization, natural-language search, or agentic optimization workflows — ensuring responsible use of data, robust monitoring, and reliable behaviour in production systems.

• Mentor other engineers through design reviews, pair programming, and knowledge sharing, and contribute to creating reusable patterns and frameworks that enable fungibility across multiple domains and services within the Landing Pages ecosystem.

Experience and qualifications

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

• 5+ years of relevant professional experience.

• Extensive professional experience in software development engineering, including ownership of services or multi-service features in production environments.

• Proven expertise in full-stack development, including system design (LLD), API design, and data modeling, with strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language (Java, Kotlin, or equivalent) and associated frameworks.

• Demonstrated ability to design, implement, test, deploy, and operate scalable, reliable, and secure services with strong debugging, troubleshooting, and performance optimization skills.

• Familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real-world products, including integrating such capabilities into existing services or user experiences.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience leading the technical design and implementation of complex, multi-service or cross-team initiatives, including defining contracts, data models, and integration patterns for both frontend and backend systems.

• Track record of improving operational excellence at scale through advancements in observability, automation, reliability, incident response, and performance engineering.

• Deep hands-on experience working with large-scale distributed systems, data-intensive applications, and modern storage technologies, including designing schemas and data flows for high-traffic services.

• Safely integrates and operates AI/ML-enabled solutions that improve outcomes — such as personalized experiences, intelligent automation, or optimized decisioning — with appropriate safeguards, monitoring, and feedback mechanisms.

• Advanced familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real-world products, including partnering with data science/ML teams to productionize models and optimize their impact on key product and business metrics.