Software Development Engineer 3 Jobs in Wheeling, IL

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

• 5+ 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

• Expertise in Java or Kotlin 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