Software Development Engineer II at Expedia Group in Chicago, IL

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.

Our Technology Team partners with teams across Expedia Group to create innovative products, services, and tools to deliver high-quality experiences for travelers, partners, and our employees. A singular technology platform powered by data and machine learning provides secure, differentiated, and personalized experiences that drive loyalty and traveler satisfaction.

Our Team

We are the Expedia Group Advertising team. As a global leader in travel industry advertising, we connect advertisers with millions of travelers. This is a rapidly growing area of the business, with strong year-over-year growth, and a key area of long-term investment.

Within this organization, you’ll join the Advertiser Team, which owns the advertiser-facing portal and the backend services and APIs that power it. These systems enable advertisers and third-party partners to configure, manage, and optimize ad campaigns across Expedia Group platforms.

You will work collaboratively with engineers, product, and cross-functional partners across a globally distributed organization to build impactful solutions for advertisers and travelers worldwide.

The Role

As a Software Development Engineer II, you will play a critical role in building and scaling high-performance systems that support Expedia Group’s expanding advertising network. This role is primarily backend-focused (approximately 70–80%), with some frontend development (20–30%) supporting customer-facing experiences built in React.

You will contribute to a multi-year initiative to design and evolve a unified advertising platform, consolidating multiple ad products into a single, scalable system. Your work will directly influence advertiser experiences and shared capabilities across the platform.

In This Role, You Will

• Design, build, test, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs that power the advertiser portal and enable third-party integrations
• Contribute to the development of a unified ads platform, delivering reusable capabilities across multiple advertising products
• Own features and services end-to-end—from design and implementation to deployment and operational support
• Apply strong coding fundamentals to deliver high-quality, maintainable, and extensible solutions
• Participate in system design, low-level design, API design (including GraphQL), and data modeling
• Build customer-facing features (primarily backend-driven, with some React frontend contributions)
• Drive improvements in scalability, performance, and reliability for high-traffic advertiser systems
• Collaborate with engineering, product, operations, and globally distributed teams to translate business needs into technical solutions
• Troubleshoot production issues and improve system health through monitoring, debugging, automation, and observability practices
• Write secure, well-tested code, participate in code reviews, and follow engineering best practices
• Leverage AI-enabled solutions and AI-assisted development tools to improve developer productivity and product outcomes

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 3+ years of software development experience building and supporting production systems and services
• Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and core computer science fundamentals
• Experience owning components or services, including implementation, testing, deployment, and operational support
• Experience designing and building scalable backend systems and APIs
• Proficiency in one or more of the following: Java, Kotlin (or ability to ramp quickly), and familiarity with React
• Experience with API design and consumption, including REST and/or GraphQL
• Experience working across multiple technical systems or services, with the ability to debug and deliver maintainable solutions

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building software for advertising technology, marketplaces, or other high-scale distributed systems
• Experience with event streaming or messaging systems (e.g., Flink, Kafka, or similar real-time data processing technologies)
• Experience contributing to architecture and design discussions for services, APIs, and data models
• Demonstrated ability to improve service quality through performance tuning, observability, and automation
• Experience using metrics and data to inform engineering decisions and measure impact
• Familiarity with AI-driven systems and/or AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude)
• Experience building customer-facing features, including frontend development with React
• Background working on large-scale, high-throughput systems or platforms

What You’ll Bring

• A strong sense of ownership, with a track record of delivering solutions end-to-end
• Ability to collaborate effectively across teams and contribute to a highly collaborative engineering culture
• Passion for building scalable, high-performance systems and improving the developer and customer experience
• Interest in solving complex problems in a fast-growing, high-impact area of the business

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 $111,000.00 to $155,500.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $177,500.00, 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.

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 at https://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 at https://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 is https://careers.expediagroup.com/jobs/.

Equal Opportunity Expedia is committed to creating an inclusive work environment with a diverse workforce. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. This employer participates in E-Verify. The employer will provide the Social Security Administration (SSA) and, if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with information from each new employee's I-9 to confirm work authorization.