Senior Software Development Engineer, Advertising Technology

Senior Software Development Engineer

Expedia Group Advertising builds the platforms and experiences that connect advertisers with millions of travelers across the globe. Our mission is to help partners reach the right traveler with the right message at the right time through intuitive advertiser experiences, high-performance ad delivery systems, and intelligent AI-powered optimization.

We are growing our Advertiser Experience engineering team and are looking for a talented, product-minded Senior Software Development Engineer with deep experience building and operating production machine learning systems. This role is ideal for an engineer who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with hands-on ML engineering expertise and is passionate about bringing intelligent capabilities into customer-facing products at scale.

You will help shape the next generation of our advertising marketplace by building scalable advertiser-facing platforms, backend services, and ML-powered capabilities that drive measurable business outcomes. Working at the intersection of distributed systems, machine learning, and product development, you will be responsible for productionizing and operating intelligent systems that power recommendations, ranking, forecasting, decision support, and generative AI experiences for advertisers.

Success in this role requires the ability to design and build production-grade software, deploy and operate machine learning models and inference services at scale, and partner closely with ML engineers, applied scientists, and product teams to transform data and models into impactful advertiser experiences.

In This Role, You Will

• Lead the design, implementation, and evolution of backend APIs and distributed services that power high-quality advertiser experiences with strong performance, reliability, trust, and transparency.
• Own and evolve the architecture of core platform services supporting campaign management, optimization, and intelligent decisioning across Expedia Group's advertising network.
• Build and operate production systems that integrate machine learning into advertiser workflows, including recommendations, smart defaults, ranking, prediction, forecasting, and AI-assisted decision support.
• Lead the application of LLMs and generative AI to improve campaign setup, streamline configuration workflows, and automate repetitive operational tasks at scale.
• Collaborate with software engineers and ML engineers or applied scientists to design and deliver batch and real-time systems for advertising use cases.
• Drive end-to-end delivery of complex, multi-quarter initiatives from technical design through production deployment, monitoring, and iterative improvement.
• Establish and uphold engineering best practices across software and ML-powered systems, including code quality, testing, observability, system reliability, and model/service monitoring.
• Design and operate scalable data and ML-enabled services, including feature pipelines, inference services, experimentation frameworks, and production monitoring for model and system health.
• Partner with product, UX, analytics, and business stakeholders to identify high-impact opportunities and translate them into scalable technical solutions.
• Contribute to cross-team initiatives that improve performance, scalability, and operational maturity of platform and AI-driven systems.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and technical guidance, helping raise the bar for engineering quality and system design.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 8+ years of experience, or Master's degree with 6+ years of experience, in a related technical field; or equivalent professional experience.
• Strong experience designing and building scalable backend services and distributed systems in production.
• Strong programming experience in Python and at least one of Java, Kotlin, or similar backend languages.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience building, deploying, and operating machine learning or AI-powered systems in production environments.
• Experience integrating ML models or AI capabilities (e.g., recommendations, ranking, prediction, or LLM-based features) into production software systems.
• Experience working with data and ML pipelines, including batch or streaming data processing and model inference workflows.
• Familiarity with cloud-native distributed systems and platforms such as AWS, Kubernetes, or equivalent.
• Experience collaborating with product and business partners to translate requirements into technical solutions.
• Proven ability to lead end-to-end technical design for complex systems and deliver them in production.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or operating LLM-based systems such as RAG pipelines, embeddings-based retrieval, or AI copilots.
• Experience with ML infrastructure components such as feature stores, model serving systems, or experimentation platforms.
• Experience with data processing frameworks such as Spark or similar large-scale processing tools.
• Experience with MLOps practices, including model versioning, CI/CD for ML systems, automated evaluation, monitoring, and retraining.
• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to technical leadership within a team.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience in advertising, marketplaces, e-commerce, or travel domains.

What Success Looks Like

You build and evolve scalable advertiser platform services that are reliable, maintainable, and widely adopted by partner teams.

You successfully bring ML and AI-powered capabilities into production that measurably improve advertiser outcomes and reduce operational complexity.

You strengthen engineering excellence across system design, reliability, observability, and production readiness.

You contribute to shaping how AI and ML are applied within advertiser-facing products while growing the technical capability of the team.

Location:

Please note that this role is only available in Chicago, IL, in alignment with our flexible work model, which requires employees to be in the office at least three days a week. We are unable to offer relocation assistance for this role.

The total cash range for this position in Chicago is $171,500.00 to $240,000.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $274,500.00, 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.

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