Principal AI Forward Deployed Engineer

At Expedia Group, we help travelers explore the world, one journey at a time. As a global travel company powered by passionate people, trusted partnerships, and leading technology, we connect travelers, partners, and advertisers through our consumer brands, B2B network, and travel advertising business.

Here, you'll do meaningful work that helps millions of people discover, book, and experience travel with more ease, confidence, and joy. Our five Behaviors-Traveler First, Think Big, Operate with Excellence, Ownership Mindset, and Succeed Together-help foster a supportive environment where people can grow their careers and have the flexibility, benefits, and support to do their best work. Join us and build for travelers everywhere.

Principal AI Forward Deployed Engineer

Introduction to the Team:  

Within CTO Enablement,the AI Enablement and Culture Officeis helping Expedia Group become AI-native by turningAI experimentation into measurable business impact—creating capacity, improving speed and quality, and building AI fluency across the enterprise. As a Principal AI Forward Deployed Engineer, you willembedwith teamsin Business Units/Enterprise functionsacross EG toidentify high-value opportunities,translate ambiguous business challenges into measurable outcomes, and rapidly prototype, productionize, and scale AI-powered solutions.  

You will be a highly influential technical leader who coaches senior individual contributors in leadership and engineering practices, partners with executive leaders, and turns emerging AI capabilities into reusable patterns, tools, and ways of working that teams can adopt. Combining deep hands-on engineering with strong partnership and change leadership, you will help teams adopt AI responsibly and at scale while keeping meaningful outcomes for travelers, partners, and employees at the center. 

In this role, you will: 

• Partner withbusiness-unit and functional leaders, domain experts, end users, and technologists across Expedia Group todiscover high-value AI opportunities, define measurable outcomes, andestablish pragmatic delivery plans. 

• Operate as a forward-deployed technical leader,partnering directly withbusiness units and their teamsto understandworkflows, constraints, data, and systems, and owning engagements through delivery, adoption, and value realization. 

• Ownthe full lifecycle of AI initiatives—from discoverytouse-case framing totechnical design torapid prototyping, production deployment, adoption, measurement,valuerealizationand continuous improvement. 

• Translate ambiguous business problems intomeasurable outcomes, explicit assumptions, data requirements, and scalable, resilient, maintainable AI-enabled systems. 

• Define and communicate a north star technology vision forAI capabilitieswithin a business-unit domain, workflow, or capability area with multiple teams, balancingspeed to value with reliability, security, privacy, cost, and long-term maintainability. 

• Designhighly complex systems that interact across a business unit, applying sound system design, API design, data modeling, observability,evaluation, and testability practices across multiple technologies and languages. 

• Evaluate and select models, platforms, tools, and architectural patterns for AI use cases, including retrieval, orchestration, agentic workflows, human-in-the-loop controls, and integration with enterprise systems. 

• Establish and evangelize software and AI engineering standards across multiple teams, including architecture, data contracts, evaluation, testing, observability, operational excellence, security, privacy, cost management, and responsible AI. 

• Convert lessons from individual deployments intoreusable reference implementations, frameworks, prompts, evaluation approaches,engineering standards, andenablement materials. 

• Define success measures before implementation and communicate impact across adoption, quality, productivity, capacity created, cycle time, cost, ROI, risk, and sustained business outcomes. 

• Influence technical direction across multiple teams and stakeholder groups, aligning senior leaders and partners around domain strategy, trade-offs, and measurable outcomes. 

• Develop engineers, senior individual contributors, and emerging technical leaders; coach senior talent tooperate independently and extend engineering practices across the organization. 

Minimum Qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree with 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, or a master’s degree with 10+ years of professional software engineering experience orequivalent professional experience. 

• Demonstrated ownership ofcomplexsystems, workflows or platforms thatsupporta business unit orfunction,and integrate with broader ExpediaGroup systems and cross-domain capabilities. 

• Deepexpertise in professional software engineering practices across the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, operations, system design, API design, data modeling, and observability. 

• Experience making technology and architecture choices across teams and multiple technologies or languages, while guiding others toward well-defined solutions for complex systems. 

• Hands-on experience building, deploying, or operating AI-enabled systems, tools, agents, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real-world products or business processes. 

• Experienceworking directly within partnerbusiness units and their teamsto understand ambiguous needs, deliver usable technical solutions quickly, and drive adoption beyond theinitial prototype or pilot. 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience definingAI engineering, software engineering, or architecture best practices at a department or organizational level andestablishing standards for operational excellence, code quality, scalability, resilience, observability, testability,evaluation, and responsible AI across multiple projects. 

• Proven ability to shapeproduct and technology direction, developbusiness-unit and domain-level AI architecture vision,while creating reusable patterns that can scale across Expedia Group. 

• Experience designing and productionizing LLM, generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic, conversational, or AI-assisted workflow solutions. 

• Experienceestablishing AI evaluation and governance practices, including quality measurement, hallucination mitigation, confidence scoring, human oversight, security, privacy, auditability, and monitoring. 

• Experience serving as atrusted technical partner to executive and cross-organizational leaders,influencingdomainstrategy and enabling decisions across cross-functional teams. 

• Demonstratedsuccess mentoring engineers across multiple levels, coaching senior individual contributors in leadership skills,identifying rising talent, andsupporting engineering-management priorities through technical partnership when needed. 

• Experience evaluating industry trends pragmatically, distinguishing durable opportunities from disruptive or short-lived technologies, and applying AI/ML-enabled approaches selectively to improveengineering, product, or operational outcomes. 

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.

Benefits and perks

Expedia Group offers benefits and perks designed to support employees and their families, including medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, an Employee Assistance Program, wellness and travel reimbursement, travel discounts, and International Airlines Travel Agent Network (IATAN) membership. Learn more about life at Expedia Group athttps://careers.expediagroup.com/life.

Accommodation requests

Expedia Group is committed to providing an inclusive and accessible recruiting experience. If you need an accommodation or adjustment due to a disability during the application or recruiting process, please submit a request athttps://expedia.service-now.com/askeg?id=job_accommodation.

About Expedia Group

Expedia Group includes three flagship consumer brands - Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo - along with a leading B2B travel business and travel advertising offerings. Across our brands and business, we help travelers explore the world with confidence and ease.

Important notice

Employment opportunities and job offers at Expedia Group will always come from Expedia Group's Talent Acquisition and hiring teams. Never share sensitive personal information unless you are confident of the recipient. Expedia Group does not extend job offers via email or messaging tools to individuals with whom we have not made prior contact. Our email domain is @expediagroup.com. The official place to find and apply for roles ishttps://careers.expediagroup.com/jobs/.

Equal Opportunity