Senior Principal Software Development Engineer| REMOTE | US
Travel obsessed? Big tech fan? Hey, you’re in good company. If you want to be
part of the industry that makes the world go round, then look no further.
Travelport is the brains behind lots of your travel bookings- plane, car or
hotel. Our technology is used to book that magical holiday, infamous
long-awaited bucket list trip or that overdue school reunion. While we can’t
solve mosquito bites or lost luggage, we can simplify a lot of the technical
parts of travel, and we’re looking for the best thinkers to help us do it.
We’re hiring right now for a Senior Principal Software Development Engineer!
Search for #Travelport on LinkedIn and hear from our amazing team.
How you’ll make an impact:
The Senior Principal Software Development Engineer! is responsible for leading
the strategy, development, and adoption of engineering platforms, tools, and
delivery capabilities that enable high-performing software teams across the
organization. This leader will drive engineering excellence, modern software
delivery practices, and platform standardization while partnering closely with
Product, Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, and Engineering leadership.
Your role in action:
Hands-On Technical Leadership & Enablement
Work directly in the code — designing, building, refactoring, reviewing — to
set the technical standard by example, not by decree.
Lead a platform/enablement squad that creates reusable capabilities and paved
paths other teams adopt to move faster with less risk.
Spread patterns by shipping reference implementations teams can copy, not
policies they must comply with, partnering with the squad's Director who owns
day-to-day delivery.
AI-Native Platform & Software Delivery
Design, build, and operate MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and the agent
tooling and services that hang off them, exposing model-backed capabilities
to product surfaces and partner/agent consumers.
Design clean APIs across both AI-native / LLM-facing and traditional REST
patterns, and own the production serving path plus the feedback-loop plumbing
that routes production signals back to Data Science.
Build observability and evaluation for AI systems — tracing, monitoring, and
eval harnesses — as first-class platform capabilities, and advance continuous
delivery by separating deployment from release (progressive rollouts, feature
flags, telemetry-driven validation).
Drive simplification before migration — consolidating services whose
boundaries exist only because organizational boundaries once did — and
generate high-value tests from real production behavior.
AI-Accelerated Engineering Practice
Raise the whole team's throughput with AI in the development loop — agentic
coding, AI-assisted testing and code review — and establish the patterns for
using these tools effectively and responsibly.
Mentorship & Engineering Culture
Grow strong engineers into stronger ones through pairing, code review, and
everyday coaching — raising the team's confidence with MCP, AI-native API
design, and production AI tooling.
Operate with "no private knowledge": everything you build is documented,
observable, and survivable beyond any single person.
Engineering Outcomes & Excellence
Make cost visible and build cost literacy into the team's decisions; define
and improve the metrics that matter — delivery speed, quality, reliability,
developer productivity — through engineering, not reporting.
Could this be you?
10+ years designing, building, deploying, and operating production software,
with deep, current, hands-on Java plus Python and/or TypeScript for AI/MCP
work (polyglot).
Demonstrated hands-on experience building MCP servers and agent / tool-use
orchestration, with strong AI-native / LLM-facing API design alongside REST.
Experience integrating and serving model-backed capabilities in production —
inference APIs, serving paths, and the feedback loops that route production
signals back to Data Science — with production-grade observability and
evaluation for AI systems.
Enough ML literacy (model behavior, evaluation, inference trade-offs) to
partner deeply with Data Science; model training itself is not required.
Mastery of modern cloud-native engineering: Kubernetes/containers, CI/CD, and
production observability.
A track record of building things that made other engineers materially more
productive, and of leading through technical authority and mentorship as an
IC — not by managing an organization.
Preferred Qualifications
Depth with agent frameworks, tool-use orchestration, and LLM application
patterns.
Data streaming/pipeline knowledge (e.g., Kafka) sufficient to build feedback
loops; deeper data-lake tooling a plus.
Internal developer platform / developer-experience work at scale; service
consolidation in large codebases; cloud cost governance / FinOps sensibility.
Who This Role Is — and Isn't — For
This role is for a builder. If you are happiest in the code, if your proudest
achievements made everyone around you faster, and if you've actually shipped
AI-native systems — MCP servers, agent tooling, production serving — you'll
thrive here.
It is not for a detached architect who directs from diagrams, a
transformation leader whose impact is mostly process and presentations, or
someone whose AI experience is conceptual. The team already has a Director
for day-to-day leadership. What it needs from you is world-class, AI-native
engineering, in the trenches, every day.
Technical Leadership Competencies
Builder-Mentor — earns authority by building alongside the team and lifting
everyone's craft.
AI-Native Builder — has shipped MCP, agent tooling, and production AI
serving; knows what capabilities to expose, not just how to call a model.
Systems Simplifier — treats complexity as the enemy and removes it before
adding.
Automation-First / Telemetry-Driven — engineers the human out of the loop;
trusts production evidence over intuition.
Force Multiplier — measured by the output and growth of the engineers around
them.
Discover why our teams love working here:
Where do we start!
Offer: 230k
Our benefits package includes:
We believe all employees contribute to the success of the company and should be
able to share in that success, which is why all jobs are eligible to participate
in our bonus program with any payouts being subject to individual and company
performance. We offer a comprehensive benefit program that includes medical,
dental, vision, employer paid Disability and Basic Life Insurance, Voluntary
life options, a competitive 401(k) match, as well as many other voluntary
benefits to fit your specific needs. We make health and wellness a priority and
offer a generous paid time off policy, hybrid working model, as well as
contributing to our communities with an annual volunteer day off. We also offer
a New Child leave policy, where the birthing parent receives 16 weeks of paid
time off, and the non-birthing parent receives 8.
Your journey at Travelport starts here- apply now!
We are an equal opportunities employer and will consider all qualified
applicants purely on their skills and abilities. We will ensure that individuals
with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the
job application or interview process, to perform crucial job functions, and to
receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to
request accommodation, if needed.