About the position
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 We are seeking a talented Software Development Engineer II to join our AI Recommendations team within the Search and Recommendations organization. Our team is at the forefront of revolutionizing travel experiences through cutting-edge recommendation systems. We power personalized suggestions across Expedia Group's portfolio of brands, including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, and VRBO, enhancing user experiences on various platforms and for multiple lines of business. As a backend-focused team, we orchestrate sophisticated recommender systems that operate in real-time, design-time, and batch processing modes. Our work spans from crafting high-performance APIs to developing robust data products that fuel insights, analytics, and machine learning model training. In this dynamic environment, you'll have the opportunity to work primarily with Kotlin, while also exploring other languages like Python, Scala, front-end and data technologies as needed. Join us in shaping the future of AI-driven travel recommendations!
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain high-throughput, low-latency distributed services that power software systems across multiple brands and travel verticals
- Collaborate on the architecture and implementation of orchestration layers for real-time, design-time, and batch processing recommendation systems
- Contribute to data products development and ML model governance, driving insights, analytics, and model training
- Optimize systems to handle millions of requests per second while maintaining high accuracy and personalization
- Engage in architecture reviews, technical documentation, and code reviews, while mentoring team members on best practices in building scalable and efficient services
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align technical solutions with business objectives, identify opportunities for enhancing recommendation algorithms, and propose innovative solutions to improve user experiences
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent (3+ years software development experience), or Master's degree (2+ years post-degree experience)
- Hands-on experience developing software using Java, Scala, Kotlin, or similar object-oriented and functional languages, with strong familiarity in data structures and algorithms
- Proven experience designing and operating scalable, distributed, event-driven systems within AWS cloud infrastructure or similar technologies
- Practical knowledge of distributed SQL and NoSQL databases and caching solutions, such as Redis, Memcached, DynamoDB, or MySQL
- Excellent communication, analytical skills, a commitment to operational excellence, high-quality coding standards, and accountability for delivered solutions within globally distributed teams
Nice-to-haves
- Familiarity with recommendation systems, search algorithms, machine learning, AI technologies, or experience working with large language models (LLMs) in production is highly desirable
Benefits
- Exciting travel perks
- Generous time-off
- Parental leave
- Flexible work model
- Career development resources
