Senior Principal Software Development Engineer

Senior Principal Software Development Engineer REMOTE US

Travel obsessed Big tech fan Hey youre 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 cant solve mosquito bites or lost luggage we can simplify a lot of the technical parts of travel and were looking for the best thinkers to help us do it.

Were hiring right now for a Senior Principal Software Development Engineer! Search for #Travelport on LinkedIn and hear from our amazing team.

How youll 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 squads 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 teams 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 teams 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 teams 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 Isnt 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 youve actually shipped AI-native systems MCP servers agent tooling production serving youll 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 everyones 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: 200k

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 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.