Software Development Engineer III - C++

About the role

Join Expedia Group’s Engineering organization within our core Development division. You will lead design and delivery of high-performance C++ systems that support critical, large-scale travel workloads.

Responsibilities

• Solve complex technical problems, evolve system architecture, and raise the engineering bar across the team in a collaborative, high-impact environment.
• Own design and implementation of critical services and components, with a focus on clean API design, robust data modeling, and reliable system behavior.
• Lead and contribute to system design, including low-level design decisions, to ensure services are scalable, observable, and maintainable.
• Implement high-quality, well-tested C++ code; conduct and drive code reviews; and help advance engineering standards, tooling, and best practices across the team.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, and partner engineering teams to deliver features end-to-end, balancing technical quality with delivery timelines.
• Safely integrate and operate AI/ML-enabled solutions that improve outcomes, leveraging AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows where appropriate.
• Use telemetry and diagnostics (metrics, logs, tracing, profiling tools, experimentation frameworks) to analyze system behavior and drive data-informed decisions.
• Mentor and coach other engineers, providing technical guidance, reviewing designs, and helping grow the team’s C++ and systems expertise.
• Influence longer-term architecture and roadmap within your area, identifying and driving initiatives that improve reliability, performance, and developer productivity.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent related professional experience.
• 5+ years of relevant professional software engineering experience (or equivalent depth of experience).
• Demonstrated professional experience owning services or components within a broader production system.
• Strong proficiency in C++ and its ecosystem, including hands-on experience with API design, data modeling, and system design (including low-level design).
• Experience building, testing, deploying, and operating backend or full-stack services in production environments, including participation in on-call or incident response rotations as appropriate.
• Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and object-oriented design.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building high-performance, production-grade C++ systems with a focus on performance optimization, memory efficiency, concurrency, and reliability at scale.
• Strong background in systems design and API development, including designing maintainable interfaces, data models, and evolving existing architectures in complex distributed environments.
• Practical experience using telemetry and diagnostics (metrics, logs, tracing, profiling, experimentation) to analyze and improve system behavior.
• Exposure to integrating intelligent or AI-enabled capabilities into backend systems (for example, inference APIs, personalization features, or AI-assisted engineering workflows) and interest in leveraging emerging technologies to enhance system performance and developer productivity.
• Experience mentoring other engineers and contributing to hiring, onboarding, and raising the technical bar for the team.