Expedia Group · 1 month ago
Principal Software Development Engineer - Observability
USA - California - San Jose
Full-time
Onsite
Lead/Staff
$249K/yr - $348K/yr
10+ years expExpedia Group is a leader in global travel technology, aiming to create innovative solutions for travelers and partners. The Principal Software Development Engineer will lead the architecture and implementation of a centralized observability platform, providing technical leadership and driving best practices across the engineering organization.
CommunitiesInternetReservationsTask ManagementTechnical SupportTicketingTourismTransportationTravel
Responsibilities
Architect and Build Core Telemetry Pipelines: Lead the design and implementation of highly scalable and resilient telemetry pipelines for logs, metrics, and traces. Evolve our platform to handle a 10x increase in data volume while maintaining performance and cost-effectiveness
Drive OpenTelemetry Adoption: Spearhead the strategy, rollout, and support for the OpenTelemetry collector across thousands of services. Develop best practices and automated configurations to ensure seamless and consistent data collection
Implement Platform Governance and Optimization: Design and build capabilities for data governance, cost allocation, and resource management within the observability platform. Define and implement SLOs for the platform itself and create tools to help teams manage their observability costs
Elevate the Practice of Observability: Act as a thought leader, driving the adoption of observability best practices across the engineering organization. Improve the developer experience by unifying tooling (e.g., Grafana, Datadog, Splunk), documentation, and service lifecycle management within our internal developer portal
Automate Infrastructure Lifecycle: Author and maintain production-grade Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform and/or Crossplane. Eliminate manual toil by automating cluster provisioning, dependency upgrades, and incident remediation workflows
Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Act as a force multiplier. Mentor senior engineers on the team, lead architecture review sessions, and author RFCs to build consensus on significant technical decisions. Your influence will extend beyond the team to application developers and SREs
Production Debugging: Serve as the final escalation point for complex, cross-cutting production incidents related to the observability platform, from telemetry agent bugs to data correlation failures in our distributed systems
Collaborate and Innovate: Explore and utilize a wide variety of technologies and tools, such as (but not limited to) Go, Java, Python, AWS, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, and Splunk, Clickhouse
Qualification
Required
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on building and operating large-scale distributed systems, infrastructure automation, or configuration management
Deep expertise in observability principles and the 'three pillars': logs, metrics, and traces
Strong hands-on proficiency with observability technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, and OpenTelemetry
Proficient in one or more of: Go, Java, Python
Solid understanding of cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, Docker, microservices) and major cloud platforms (AWS preferred)
Preferred
Experience designing, building, and operating highly available, scalable, and resilient platforms
Excellent hands-on coder who understands and appreciates bigger-picture architectural and business concerns
Clear communicator with the ability to concisely explain complex technical details to a wide variety of audiences in both verbal and written form
A creative problem solver who uses data and insights to support recommendations and influence decisions
Experience mentoring other senior engineers and establishing standards for operational excellence and code quality at a multi-project level
Benefits
Medical/dental/vision
Paid time off
Employee Assistance Program
Wellness & travel reimbursement
Travel discounts
International Airlines Travel Agent (IATAN) membership
Company
Expedia Group
At Expedia Group (NASDAQ: EXPE), we believe travel is a force for good – it opens minds, builds connections, and bridges divides.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Expedia Group has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
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Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (519)
2024 (410)
2023 (382)
2022 (629)
2021 (483)
2020 (366)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$4.25BKey Investors
TCV
2025-02-21Post Ipo Debt· $985M
2020-04-23Post Ipo Equity· $1.2B
2020-04-23Post Ipo Debt· $2B
Leadership Team
Ariane Gorin
Chief Executive Officer
Ramana Thumu
Chief Technology Officer
Recent News
2026-01-16
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2026-01-07
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