Globalization Platform Lead

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.

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, and career development resources, all to fuel our employees' passion for travel and ensure a rewarding career journey.

The Globalization Platform organisation plays a critical role in enabling Expedia Group’s products and experiences to be truly global by default. Our mission is to help teams build once and ship everywhere by providing shared globalization platforms, AI-enabled localization services, and developer tooling used across Expedia Group brands and markets. We work closely with Product, Engineering, Machine Learning, UX, Localization, and Analytics teams across regions to ensure global experiences scale with quality, speed, and reliability.

As a Globalization Platform Lead you will be a hands-on contributor building and operating global platform services that power localization, machine translation, and multilingual content delivery at scale. The role emphasizes automation, API-driven design, system reliability, and data-informed decision-making, while gradually developing architectural ownership across globalization platforms and tooling. This position is well suited to someone who enjoys solving complex platform problems, collaborating cross-functionally, and applying AI and NLP techniques to real-world systems.

In This Role, You Will

• Design, build, and operate microservices and APIs that support translation orchestration, localization automation, and multilingual content delivery for product teams across Expedia Group.
• Own the end-to-end delivery of assigned platform services, including implementation, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, deployment, monitoring, and production support.
• Develop and maintain SDKs and client libraries (Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript) to improve adoption and developer experience.
• Contribute to system and API design discussions, technical documentation, and globalization engineering standards, including internationalization best practices (Unicode, ICU, CLDR, locales, and formatting).
• Add and maintain observability (metrics, logs, dashboards, alerts) to improve system reliability, operational efficiency, and data-driven decision-making.
• Build integrations between machine translation engines, LLM-based systems, and internal platforms using APIs and automation workflows.
• Run technical experiments and proofs-of-concept to evaluate AI-powered localization approaches, including prompt-based and agentic AI workflows.
• Apply NLP and NLU techniques to improve translation quality evaluation, terminology management, and multilingual content understanding.
• Build and maintain tooling for MT evaluation, linguistic quality analysis (LQA), and terminology extraction using Python or AI-based approaches.
• Partner with Analytics, Localization, and vendor teams to operationalize linguistic improvements and turn data into actionable insights.
• Collaborate closely with Product, UX, ML, and Platform Engineering teams to embed globalization early in the product development lifecycle.
• Support planning cycles, workflow automation, documentation, and knowledge sharing across teams.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field; or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of relevant professional experience in technical operations, platform engineering, or software development.
• Strong programming experience with Python and JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Experience building, operating, or supporting production services, internal platforms, or automation pipelines.
• Experience working with REST APIs, automated testing, and CI/CD pipelines in cloud-based environments.
• Solid understanding of internationalization fundamentals, including Unicode, ICU, and CLDR.
• Working knowledge of NLP/NLU concepts such as tokenization, embeddings, classification, semantic similarity, or entity extraction.
• Experience owning technical deliverables end-to-end, including production support and incident troubleshooting.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with global partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to globalization or localization systems, TMS platforms, machine translation engines, or multilingual product development.
• Familiarity with LLM-based systems, prompt engineering, or AI-assisted workflows in production environments.
• Experience contributing to system design reviews and improving reliability through monitoring and observability.
• Experience working with data dashboards or analytics for quality, cost, performance, or adoption metrics.
• Demonstrated ability to work cross-functionally and embed platform capabilities into broader product ecosystems.

The total cash range for this position in Seattle is $116,500.00 to $163,000.00. Employees in this role have the potential to increase their pay up to $186,500.00, 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.

Expedia Group is proud to offer a wide range of benefits to support employees and their families, including medical/dental/vision, paid time off, and an Employee Assistance Program. To fuel each employee’s passion for travel, we offer a wellness & travel reimbursement, travel discounts, and an International Airlines Travel Agent (IATAN) membership.

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, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability or age.