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. Distinguished Software Development Engineering, Marketing Technology Introduction to the Team At Expedia Group, we are reinventing the future of marketing technology. Our Marketing Technology platform, which is at the intersection of travel, technology, and AI powers global marketing at scale across Google, Meta, Apple, and beyond, and we are evolving for a world where AI systems increasingly participate alongside humans in planning, optimization, and execution. Our team’s mission is to design best-in-class marketing platforms that deliver measurable business impact while pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. We operate like a startup inside a global company by moving fast, experimenting boldly, and building for scale. Technologies we work with include Golang, Python, Kotlin, React, Kubernetes, Argo, and AWS (EC2, ECS, EMR, RDS, S3). Our current platform already powers billions in global marketing spend across performance, brand, and creative channels. The next phase is to build more adaptive, intelligent, and autonomous systems that materially improve growth, efficiency, and capability across Expedia Group. As a Distinguished Engineer, you will define and build the technical foundations of this transformation. This is not a role confined to a single system or team. It is a company-level technical leadership role responsible for rethinking how marketing technology works end-to-end, from data and decisioning to experimentation, creative generation, and intelligent execution. If you thrive on solving complex problems with a hands on approach at massive scale, shaping platform strategy, and mentoring world-class engineers, this is the place for you.

Responsibilities

• Set Technical Direction for the Future of Marketing Systems: Define the multi-year technical vision for next-generation marketing platforms across Expedia Group. Identify and drive high-leverage technical investments that unlock meaningful gains in growth, efficiency, quality, and organizational capability. Anticipate how AI, automation, and intelligent systems will reshape marketing workflows and architect platforms accordingly.
• Build intelligent, extensible platforms: Design systems that enable increasingly autonomous operation across planning, creation, optimization, and execution workflows. Establish scalable interfaces, data contracts, and architectural patterns that allow intelligent systems and services to operate safely and effectively at scale. Lead the evolution from workflow automation and point solutions toward cohesive, adaptive platform capabilities.
• Operate at system-of-systems scale: Architect and evolve high-scale, real-time platforms spanning bidding, experimentation, decisioning, creative systems, and supporting data infrastructure. Ensure platforms are resilient, observable, maintainable, and cost-effective under significant scale and complexity. Drive simplification and convergence across fragmented systems into cohesive, extensible platforms.
• Solve ambiguous, high-impact problems: Lead initiatives where the problem, path, and solution are not fully defined. Break down complex, cross-domain challenges into clear technical strategy and executable plans. Navigate tradeoffs across performance, latency, cost, reliability, model capability, and business impact.
• Shape both strategy and execution: Partner with engineering, product, science, marketing, and business leaders to influence both what should be built and how it should be built. Use technical judgment, market awareness, and analytical insight to help shape investments, priorities, and long-term platform direction. Help shape technology-enabled traveler experiences that improve discovery, shopping, and booking across Expedia Group brands and channels.
• Raise the bar across the organization: Align senior technical and business leaders around critical architectural decisions and long-term investments. Define standards, patterns, and best practices that improve engineering quality, speed, reliability, and operational excellence across Expedia Group. Build communities of practice and bar-raising mechanisms across Marketing and Expedia Group that help teams deliver faster and with higher quality.
• Grow technical leaders and organizational capability: Mentor and sponsor senior engineers and technical leaders. Strengthen the organization through technical leadership, coaching, and example. Act as a force multiplier by creating reusable approaches, improving engineering judgment, and enabling teams to deliver more effectively at scale.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, distributed systems, with significant impact across multiple organizations, platforms, or domains.
• Proven track record of defining and driving technical strategy across teams and influencing adoption across independent organizations.
• Deep expertise in system architecture, distributed systems, and data-intensive platforms at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to lead ambiguous, high-stakes technical initiatives from concept through production.
• Broad technical depth across multiple layers of the stack, with the ability to reason holistically across application, platform, data, operational, and business concerns.
• Strong proficiency in modern programming languages, cloud-native architectures, and production-grade engineering practices.
• Exceptional ability to influence senior leaders and align organizations around complex technical decisions.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience building AI/ML-driven or agent-enabled systems in production, including decisioning, optimization, generative systems, or intelligent workflow orchestration
• Deep domain expertise in marketing technology, advertising systems, search, experimentation, or optimization platforms.
• Track record of creating new platforms, primitives, or architectural patterns adopted across an organization.
• Experience designing systems that balance model capability, latency, cost, reliability, and operational complexity at scale.
• Proven ability to shape product or business direction through technical insight and systems thinking.
• Experience building communities, technical programs, or bar-raising initiatives that improved organizational effectiveness across multiple teams.

Benefits

• medical/dental/vision
• paid time off
• Employee Assistance Program
• wellness & travel reimbursement
• travel discounts
• International Airlines Travel Agent (IATAN) membership