Senior Full Stack Agentic AI Engineer — Layla AI

At Expedia Group, we help travelers explore the world, one journey at a time. As a global travel company powered by passionate people, trusted partnerships, and leading technology, we connect travelers, partners, and advertisers through our consumer brands, B2B network, and travel advertising business.

Here, you'll do meaningful work that helps millions of people discover, book, and experience travel with more ease, confidence, and joy. Our five Behaviors-Traveler First, Think Big, Operate with Excellence, Ownership Mindset, and Succeed Together-help foster a supportive environment where people can grow their careers and have the flexibility, benefits, and support to do their best work. Join us and build for travelers everywhere.

Location : Seattle preferred; other locations and employment arrangement to be confirmed

About Layla AI

Layla is an AI-native travel-planning and booking company within Expedia Group’s Product organization. The team is building conversational experiences that help travelers move from inspiration to a complete, bookable itinerary across flights, hotels, activities, and day-by-day plans.

The team is small, senior, and startup-paced. Engineers are expected to take meaningful ownership, move from ambiguous problem to production, and use data, experimentation, and AI-assisted development practices to improve the traveler experience.

THE OPPORTUNITY

We are looking for a Senior Full Stack Agentic AI Engineer to help build the next generation of proactive travel-planning experiences at Layla.

You will work across agent orchestration, backend services, data and retrieval systems, and user-facing product experiences. You will help turn emerging agentic capabilities into reliable, understandable, and useful traveler workflows — not simply prototypes or chat interfaces.

This is a high-autonomy, broad-scope senior individual contributor role — often described as a “ Super IC ” profile — with the opportunity to connect product intent, agent architecture, full-stack implementation, and production outcomes. The role has shared ownership: you will help shape direction and own meaningful work while partnering closely across Product, Design, Data, and Engineering rather than working in isolation.

At Layla, engineers can influence a product used by travelers around the world. We are looking for someone energized by the opportunity to bring ideas forward, explore possibilities, and turn them into reliable experiences at global travel scale. You do not need to arrive with every answer or every technology; curiosity, sound judgment, initiative, and a willingness to learn are essential.

WHAT WE VALUE BEYOND THE CHECKLIST

The scope of this role is intentionally broad, but it is not a request for one person to be an expert in everything. We value engineers who can connect disciplines, identify where they can contribute most, collaborate generously, and bring in the right partners when deeper expertise is needed. Strong candidates may have different paths through full-stack engineering, applied AI, product development, or startup environments; what matters is the ability to learn, make sound tradeoffs, and turn ideas into outcomes.

In this role, you will

• Design, build, and operate agentic AI experiences that support travel discovery, itinerary planning, personalization, and booking-related workflows.

• Develop reliable agent orchestration patterns, including planning, tool use, routing, state management, memory, retries, guardrails, and human confirmation where appropriate.

• Build and evolve backend services, APIs, data models, integrations, and event-driven workflows that connect agent experiences to Expedia Group and Layla capabilities.

• Build user-facing experiences that make AI behavior clear, useful, and actionable across web and other relevant product surfaces.

• Integrate retrieval, knowledge, and recommendation capabilities using appropriate data contracts, embeddings, search, ranking, and grounding strategies.

• Establish evaluation and observability practices for agentic systems, including quality, task completion, latency, cost, safety, failure modes, and user impact.

• Take shared ownership of a meaningful product surface, from framing the problem and exploring solutions through implementation, launch, measurement, and iteration.

• Translate ambiguous product opportunities into thin, testable increments and ship quickly while preserving operational and architectural quality.

• Partner closely with Product, Design, Data, and Engineering to shape product direction, define success metrics, and connect technical decisions to traveler outcomes.

• Apply strong software engineering practices across testing, CI/CD, observability, security, incident response, and production support.

• Use AI-assisted engineering tools thoughtfully to explore designs, accelerate implementation, improve test coverage, and investigate production behavior — while retaining full accountability for the code and systems shipped.

• Mentor teammates and raise the quality bar through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, reusable patterns, and hands-on technical leadership.

How you will make an impact

• Ship production agentic workflows that solve real traveler problems from inspiration through itinerary creation and, where applicable, booking at Expedia Group scale.

• Improve the reliability and observability of multi-step AI workflows so the team can understand quality, failure modes, latency, and cost.

• Establish reusable patterns for agent tools, contracts, evaluation, guardrails, and production operations.

• Partner with Product and Design to turn traveler feedback and experimentation results into better AI experiences.

• Increase the team’s ability to deliver safely and quickly through clear architecture, strong engineering practices, and practical use of AI-assisted development.

Ways of working

• Own outcomes with others. Start with the traveler or business problem and work backward to the simplest useful solution, bringing partners in early.

• Bring ideas forward. Contribute hypotheses, product ideas, and technical possibilities — then test them thoughtfully with users, data, and teammates.

• Move quickly with judgment. Make progress in ambiguity while being explicit about risks, assumptions, and tradeoffs.

• Build for trust. Make AI behavior understandable, measurable, recoverable, and appropriately constrained.

• Stay hands-on and collaborative. Seniority means technical ownership and leverage, while recognizing that the strongest outcomes come from shared expertise.

• Learn in public. Share context, document decisions, and create patterns that help a small team move faster.

WHAT YOU BRING

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including experience delivering production systems end to end.

• Demonstrated experience building and operating full-stack applications, with meaningful depth in backend services and modern web or product-facing interfaces.

• Professional experience integrating LLMs or AI/ML capabilities into production products, workflows, or platforms.

• Experience with agentic patterns such as tool-using agents, multi-step workflows, orchestration, RAG, function calling, structured outputs, or human-in-the-loop systems.

• Strong programming ability in at least one backend language such as Python, Java, Kotlin, Go, or TypeScript, plus experience contributing to a modern frontend stack.

• Experience designing APIs, services, data models, integrations, automated tests, and production monitoring.

• Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly and collaborate effectively with product, design, data, and engineering partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building AI agents or assistants th