The Senior Full Stack Agentic AI Engineer role (within Expedia Group, Layla AI team) focuses on building proactive, production-quality agentic travel-planning experiences. The position spans orchestration, backend services, data and retrieval systems, and user-facing product surfaces.
Location
Seattle, WA (onsite). Seattle is preferred; other locations and the employment arrangement will be confirmed.
Compensation
USD 184,500 to 295,000 per year. Potential pay increase up to $295,000 based on ongoing, demonstrated, and sustained performance.
- Total cash range in Seattle: $184,500.00 to $258,000.00; potential to increase up to $295,000.00.
- Total cash range in Austin: $184,500.00 to $258,000.00; potential to increase up to $295,000.00.
- Starting pay varies by factors including location, available budget, and an individual’s knowledge, skills, and experience.
- Pay ranges may be modified in the future.
Summary
This role will partner across Product, Design, Data, and Engineering to ship reliable AI workflows at global travel scale. The scope includes agent orchestration, backend integrations, retrieval and grounding strategies, evaluation and observability, and taking shared ownership of meaningful product surfaces from problem framing through iteration.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate agentic AI experiences for travel discovery, itinerary planning, personalization, and booking-related workflows.
- Develop reliable agent orchestration patterns, including planning, tool use, routing, state management, memory, retries, guardrails, and human confirmation where appropriate.
- Build and evolve backend services, APIs, data models, integrations, and event-driven workflows connecting agent experiences to Expedia Group and Layla capabilities.
- Create user-facing experiences that make AI behavior clear, useful, and actionable across web and other relevant product surfaces.
- Integrate retrieval, knowledge, and recommendation capabilities using data contracts, embeddings, search, ranking, and grounding strategies.
- Establish evaluation and observability for agentic systems, including quality, task completion, latency, cost, safety, failure modes, and user impact.
- Take shared ownership of a meaningful product surface, from framing the problem and exploring solutions through implementation, launch, measurement, and iteration.
- Convert ambiguous product opportunities into thin, testable increments while maintaining operational and architectural quality.
- Partner with Product, Design, Data, and Engineering to define success metrics and connect technical decisions to traveler outcomes.
- Apply strong software engineering practices including testing, CI/CD, observability, security, incident response, and production support.
- Use AI-assisted engineering tools to explore designs, accelerate implementation, improve test coverage, and investigate production behavior while maintaining accountability for shipped code and systems.
- Mentor teammates through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, reusable patterns, and hands-on technical leadership.
- Ship production agentic workflows that address real traveler needs from inspiration through itinerary creation and, where applicable, booking at Expedia Group scale.
- Improve reliability and observability across multi-step AI workflows to support understanding of quality, failure modes, latency, and cost.
- Establish reusable patterns for agent tools, contracts, evaluation, guardrails, and production operations.
- Incorporate traveler feedback and experimentation results to improve AI experiences with Product and Design.
- Increase team delivery capability through clear architecture, strong engineering practices, and practical use of AI-assisted development.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent professional experience).
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including end-to-end production system delivery.
- Demonstrated experience building and operating full-stack applications, including meaningful depth in backend services and modern web or product-facing interfaces.
- Professional experience integrating LLMs or AI/ML capabilities into production products, workflows, or platforms.
- Experience with agentic patterns such as tool-using agents, multi-step workflows, orchestration, RAG, function calling, structured outputs, or human-in-the-loop systems.
- Strong programming ability in at least one backend language: Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, or TypeScript, plus experience contributing to a modern frontend stack.
- Experience designing APIs, services, data models, integrations, automated tests, and production monitoring.
- Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs and collaborate effectively with product, design, data, and engineering partners.
Technologies
Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, TypeScript, LLMs, AI/ML, RAG, function calling, structured outputs, human-in-the-loop systems, LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, OpenAI tooling, Anthropic tooling, React, Next.js, GraphQL, FastAPI, REST, event-driven architecture.
Education
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent professional experience).
Benefits
- Medical/dental/vision
- Paid time off
- Employee Assistance Program
- Wellness & travel reimbursement
- Travel discounts
- International Airlines Travel Agent (IATAN) membership
- Potential pay increase up to $295,000 based on ongoing, demonstrated, and sustained performance
About Layla AI
Layla AI is an AI-native travel-planning and booking company within Expedia Group’s Product organization. The team builds conversational experiences that help travelers move from inspiration to a complete, bookable itinerary across flights, hotels, activities, and day-by-day plans. The team is small, senior, and startup-paced, with expectations for meaningful ownership, movement from ambiguous problems to production, and use of data, experimentation, and AI-assisted development practices to improve the traveler experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building AI agents or assistants that take actions through tools, APIs, or business workflows rather than only generating conversational responses.
- Experience with agent orchestration or evaluation frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, OpenAI or Anthropic tooling, or comparable systems.
- Experience with retrieval and knowledge systems, including vector search, hybrid search, embeddings, reranking, grounding, and data-quality controls.
- Experience with streaming or real-time AI interactions, conversational interfaces, or multi-step user experiences.
- Experience with React, TypeScript, Next.js, GraphQL, or comparable frontend technologies.
- Experience with Python, FastAPI, Java/Kotlin services, REST or GraphQL APIs, event-driven architecture, and cloud-native systems.
- Experience designing agent evaluation frameworks, offline test sets, online monitoring, quality rubrics, or experimentation programs.
- Experience building systems with strong safety, privacy, security, reliability, and responsible-AI considerations.
- Experience in travel, commerce, marketplace, recommendations, search, personalization, or other high-scale consumer products.
- Experience using AI coding assistants or software-engineering agents in day-to-day development, including validating, correcting, and hardening generated output.
- Experience working in a startup, incubation, or rapidly evolving product environment where priorities and requirements change quickly.
Ways of Working
- Own outcomes with others by starting from the traveler or business problem and working backward to the simplest useful solution, bringing partners in early.
- Bring ideas forward by contributing hypotheses, product ideas, and technical possibilities and testing them with users, data, and teammates.
- Move quickly with judgment by making progress in ambiguity while being explicit about risks, assumptions, and tradeoffs.
- Build for trust by making AI behavior understandable, measurable, recoverable, and appropriately constrained.
- Stay hands-on and collaborative, recognizing that seniority includes technical ownership and leverage while relying on shared expertise for the strongest outcomes.
- Learn in public by sharing context, documenting decisions, and creating patterns that help a small team move faster.
Accommodation Requests
If you need an accommodation or adjustment due to a disability during the application or recruiting process, 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 brands and businesses, Expedia Group helps travelers explore the world with confidence and ease.
Important Notice
- Employment opportunities and job offers at Expedia Group 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 it has not made prior contact.
- The official 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 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. Information from each new employee’s I-9 will be provided to the Social Security Administration and, if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security to confirm work authorization.
