[Hiring] Senior Principal Software Development Engineer @Travelport

Role Description

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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefit program including medical, dental, vision, employer paid Disability and Basic Life Insurance, Voluntary life options.
• Competitive 401(k) match.
• Generous paid time off policy and hybrid working model.
• Annual volunteer day off to contribute to communities.
• New Child leave policy: birthing parent receives 16 weeks of paid time off, non-birthing parent receives 8 weeks.