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.

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.

As Expedia Group accelerates its AI‑driven transformation and expands globally, the ability to deliver truly local, high‑quality experiences at scale has become a core competitive advantage. The Globalization Platform Lead is a critical technical leadership role that ensures globalization is not a downstream activity, but a platform capability embedded into product development from day one. This role focuses on designing, deploying and maintaining the architecture of AI‑enabled localization workflows, machine translation pipelines, and developer tooling that make it easier for product teams to launch globally. This is a highly hands‑on role for someone who enjoys building platforms, collaborating across teams, and shaping how global products are delivered.

Core responsibilities and deliverables:

• Globalization Platforms & Architecture: Design and implement services and workflows that support machine translation, localization automation, and multilingual content delivery. Contribute to technical designs and architecture reviews for globalization systems, including internal and external systems. Translate product requirements into maintainable, scalable solutions. Help define technical standards and best practices for “global‑by‑default” development. Participate in quarterly planning & prioritization cycles and drive execution of assigned globalization initiatives.
• AI/ML enablement: Build integrations between LLMs, MT engines, and internal systems using APIs. Run technical experiments to test new AI‑powered workflows, notably using Agentic AI. Engineer prompts and automation pipelines for AI‑assisted localization. Leverage NLP/NLU techniques to improve localization automation, translation quality evaluation, and multilingual content understanding across Expedia Group experiences.
• Machine Translation and linguistic systems: Develop Python and/or AI‑based tooling for MT evaluation, terminology extraction, and LQA automation. Maintain and improve MT pipelines and linguistic asset repositories. Work with our Analytics partners on building dashboards and reports from MT and TMS data sources. Partner with linguists and vendors to operationalize technical improvements.
• Cross‑functional delivery: Collaborate with Product, UX, ML, and Platform teams to embed globalization early in the development lifecycle. Support workflow automation and process improvements. Help define success metrics and track business impact. Contribute to documentation and knowledge sharing for globalization tooling.

Functional/Technical Skills:

Required Experience:

• 4–7 years of professional experience
• Strong programming skills (Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript)
• REST APIs, testing tools
• Regex and string handling
• Solid knowledge of Unicode, ICU & CLDR
• Working knowledge of NLP and NLU concepts: tokenization, embeddings, classification, sequence labeling, semantic similarity, intent/entity extraction
• Experience building production services, scripts, or internal platforms.
• Experience working with CI/CD pipelines and cloud environments.

Globalization & AI:

• Solid knowledge of i18n, localization systems, globalization platforms, NMT engines.
• Strong literacy of LLM‑based systems and prompt engineering.
• Experience in multilingual systems and experimentation.
• Working knowledge of NLU/NLP concepts.

Architecture & Operations:

• Experience contributing to system designs and technical reviews.
• Awareness of observability, monitoring, and reliability practices.
• Ability to troubleshoot production issues.

Collaboration & Communication:

• Clear written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfortable working with global partners.
• Inclusive, collaborative approach to problem‑solving.

Values & Leadership Competencies:

• Customer first & Ownership: Builds systems with traveler experience and quality at the core. Uses data to understand how global customers interact with products. Owns technical deliverables end‑to‑end within assigned projects. Flags risks early and proposes creative and when applicable, AI‑based solutions.
• Data‑driven: Defines measurable success criteria for globalization initiatives (quality, speed, cost, reliability, adoption) before building. Uses instrumentation and experimentation to validate whether AI/MT workflows improve outcomes vs. existing approaches. Builds feedback loops so production data informs model/tooling improvements (e.g., post‑edit data, LQA outcomes, customer signals). Makes tradeoffs transparently (e.g., cost vs. quality, latency vs. coverage) using evidence, not opinions. Operationalizes metrics into dashboards/alerts that teams can use without manual analysis.
• Bias for action: Ships incrementally, learns from results, and iterates quickly. Prototypes new ideas before scaling them. Ability to simplify complex systems and deploy clear, scalable and maintainable architectures. Works effectively across disciplines and geographies. Communicates clearly with both technical and non‑technical partners.
• Learning & Growth mindset: Stays current on AI + globalization trends: keeps up with developments in LLMs, MT/NMT, evaluation methods, prompt/agent patterns, terminology management, and content quality practices. Demonstrates a repeatable approach to learning: read, experiment, measure, operationalize. Can articulate trade‑offs and “why” behind decisions, not just “how.” Converts new ideas into reliable tooling, standards, and best practices adopted by product teams. Builds personal credibility across disciplines by speaking both engineering and localization/linguistic perspectives.

Accommodation requests: If you need assistance with any part of the application or recruiting process due to a disability, or other physical or mental health conditions, please reach out to our Recruiting Accommodations Team through the Accommodation Request. 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.