Senior Engineering Manager — Hotels.com Technology

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. Expedia Group brands power global travel for everyone, everywhere. We design cutting-edge tech to make travel smoother and more memorable, and we create groundbreaking solutions for our partners. Our diverse, vibrant, and welcoming community is essential in driving our success. Why Join Us? To shape the future of travel, people must come first. Guided by our Values and Leadership Agreements, we foster an open culture where everyone belongs, differences are celebrated and know that when one of us wins, we all win. We provide a full benefits package, including exciting travel perks, generous time-off, parental leave, a flexible work model (with some pretty cool offices), and career development resources, all to fuel our employees' passion for travel and ensure a rewarding career journey. We're building a more open world. Join us. The Role We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to join Hotels.com Technology in London, building the next generation of one of the world's best-known travel brands. Our mission is to make Hotels.com distinctive, indispensable, and worth talking about — by relentlessly improving the marketplace fundamentals travelers expect, and then innovating well beyond those table stakes to delight and surprise them. Concretely, that means removing friction across the shopping funnel and holding an uncompromising bar for quality and reliability; earning more direct traveler relationships through clearly valuable, differentiated experiences surfaced at the right moments; and taking real swings on novel experiences that set the brand apart. This role is deliberately broad. Rather than owning a single fixed area, you will lead your team against the highest-leverage problems in the Hotels.com experience as our priorities evolve — shopping and conversion, traveler identity and loyalty, app and web experiences, and the platform capabilities underneath them. You will own technical direction and delivery for your team, drive system and API design for performance-critical, high-traffic customer-facing services, and partner closely with Product, Design, Data, Marketing, and Platform teams in small, end-to-end squads with clear ownership. This is a hands-on leadership role. We are not looking for a pure people manager: you are expected to stay technically current and close to the code — reviewing designs and pull requests, prototyping, debugging production issues alongside your engineers, and making credible technical calls yourself. Equally, you will deliberately upskill your engineers across domains and stacks, so the team can move to wherever the highest-value work is rather than being boxed into a single specialism. As a people-first leader, you will grow and support a high-performing team of engineers, balancing rapid delivery with platform health and long-term sustainability, while fostering a culture of safe AI/ML adoption, small experiments over long planning cycles, and strong engineering fundamentals. In this role, you will: Lead a software engineering team in designing, building, and operating highly available, performant, and secure customer-facing services, including system design (LLD), API design, and data modeling for complex traveler-facing capabilities. Stay hands-on: contribute directly to design reviews, code reviews, prototypes, and production debugging, setting the technical bar by example rather than by delegation alone. Work with your peers and your manager to shape technical strategy and long-term architecture for the areas you own, aligning engineering decisions with brand and business objectives, and re-pointing your team as priorities shift across the Hotels.com experience. Broaden your engineers' technical range — deliberately grow skills across domains, stacks, and disciplines so the team can take on new problem spaces quickly and is never limited to a single area. Hold an uncompromising bar for quality and reliability in the shopping funnel: set engineering quality and operational excellence standards, and ensure robust CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices are consistently applied. Move fast with incomplete information — make well-reasoned decisions without waiting for certainty or broad consensus, and validate assumptions through small, measurable experiments rather than long planning cycles. Hire, develop, and mentor engineers and managers, fostering a high-performing, inclusive culture focused on learning, accountability, and effective collaboration with product, design, data, and other partner organizations. Make AI and Machine Learning part of every mission — safely integrate and operate AI/ML-enabled solutions that measurably improve traveler outcomes and team velocity, applying AI/ML concepts to real-world products. Work with your peers to coordinate and prioritize delivery across workstreams, managing dependencies, risks, and cross-team integration to ensure coherent, timely delivery of end-to-end capabilities across product and domain contexts. Minimum Qualifications: Bachelor's Degree or Equivalent Level; Technical Degree Preferred. 8+ years of relevant professional experience and 3+ years of people management experience. Experience managing engineering teams with end-to-end ownership of services or domains, including design, implementation, deployment, and ongoing operations for production services or multi-service systems. Currently hands-on and willing to remain so. You still write and review code, and can independently reason about designs, trade-offs, and production incidents. Candidates seeking a purely managerial, non-technical role are not a fit for this position. Strong proficiency in core software engineering practices, including object-oriented or functional programming, system design (LLD), API design, data modeling, testing strategies, and modern CI/CD pipelines. Demonstrated track record of growing engineers' technical skills, including coaching people into unfamiliar domains, stacks, or disciplines. Familiarity with AI-driven systems, tools, or workflows and applying AI/ML concepts to real world products, with the ability to guide teams in safely integrating and operating AI/ML-enabled solutions. Preferred Qualifications: Experience leading a broad technical area, setting technical direction, and driving architecture decisions for distributed systems at scale. Technical breadth across more than one stack or domain (for example backend and frontend, or web and native mobile), and a history of moving between them as needs change. Experience with high-traffic consumer e-commerce or marketplace experiences, and a track record of improving conversion, funnel quality, or customer engagement through experimentation. Demonstrated track record of improving system reliability, performance, and cost efficiency through data-driven decision making, experimentation, and continuous optimization. Proven ability to lead complex cross-team initiatives, align stakeholders across product and engineering, and deliver integrated solutions that span multiple services or domains. Experience defining and enforcing engineering standards for operational excellence, including observability, incident management, on-call practices, and post-incident learnin