Expedia Group is looking to improve the travel experience by developing innovative products, services, and tools to deliver high-quality experiences for travelers, partners, and employees, specifically through the Type-Ahead team which builds Expedia’s auto-suggest capabilities.
Requirements
- Proficiency in Kotlin, or strong experience in another JVM-based language (e.g., Java) with a willingness to learn Kotlin
- Strong understanding of algorithms, data structures, and system design principles
- Experience building auto-suggest or search systems is a strong plus
- Hands-on experience with search engines like Elasticsearch or OpenSearch
- Experience with technologies such as Redis, Apache Kafka, or Generative AI in a production environment
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, test automation, and containerization tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
Responsibilities
- Lead complex projects
- Design and develop scalable, high-performance backend services that handle millions of search requests per day
- Implement efficient data structures and algorithms to optimize auto-suggest, relevance, ranking, and retrieval using technologies like Elasticsearch and Redis
- Work on messaging and event-driven systems with Apache Kafka to ensure reliable, low-latency data flow between services
- Maintain and improve our existing Kotlin-based codebase, following software engineering best practices including CI/CD, automated testing, and monitoring
- Optimize and tune search performance in distributed systems, addressing fault tolerance, replication, and failover scenarios
- Participate in on-call rotations and contribute to improving system reliability and operational excellence
Other
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience
- 5+ years of experience in backend software development, with a focus on scalable, distributed systems
- Collaborate with product managers, engineers, scientists, and stakeholders to deliver high-quality, user-focused features
- Mentor and coach junior engineers
- Travel perks, generous time-off, parental leave, a flexible work model, and career development resources
