Suggested rewrite: Led a cross-functional initiative that improved [business outcome] by [measurable result], demonstrating experience relevant to this role...
Principal Software Engineer (Experiences)
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- Remote from
- Poland
- Salary
- Undisclosed
- Department
- Software Engineering
- Employment
- Full Time
- Experience
- Senior
- Published
- Apply before
- 14 Nov 2026
- Listing views
- 32
- Application actions
- 2
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The role, at a glance.
Tripadvisor is hiring a Principal Software Engineer to provide architectural and technical leadership for its Experiences Engineering organization. The role designs scalable, reliable distributed systems and improves operational maturity across an engineering pillar. It partners closely with engineering and product leaders to establish technical strategy, delivery milestones, and cross-team alignment. Candidates need 10+ years of commercial software development experience, cloud expertise, strong production troubleshooting skills, and experience with Java, Python, or Scala plus SQL and NoSQL databases. This is a remote-first, permanent full-time position for people within commuting distance of the Kraków office.
Role DNA
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Pace & Pressure
4/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
5/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.
Core skills
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Sample interview questions
I would explain the system context, traffic and reliability constraints, the architecture choices made, and the trade-offs considered. I would also quantify outcomes such as latency reduction, improved availability, throughput growth, or lower operational burden.
I begin with clear problem framing, constraints, success metrics, and alternative options. I seek input early from affected teams, document trade-offs and decisions, identify operational risks, and ensure ownership and follow-up actions are explicit.
I would describe how I established impact and containment, coordinated communication, used observability data to identify root cause, and restored service. Afterward, I would lead a blameless review and prioritize preventative improvements such as alerts, tests, runbooks, resilience controls, or architecture changes.
I would break the initiative into outcome-oriented increments, surface dependencies and risks early, and agree on measurable acceptance criteria. I would keep milestones realistic by balancing scope, quality, reliability work, and feedback loops from users and stakeholders.
I assess current capabilities in observability, incident response, deployment safety, capacity planning, security, and service ownership. I then establish practical standards, prioritize the highest-risk gaps, provide reusable tooling and guidance, and measure adoption and reliability outcomes over time.
About this role.
About Tripadvisor
The Tripadvisor Group connects people to experiences worth sharing, and aims to be the world’s most trusted source for travel and experiences. We leverage our brands, technology, and capabilities to connect our global audience with partners through rich content, travel guidance, and two-sided marketplaces for experiences, accommodations, restaurants, and other travel categories. The subsidiaries of Tripadvisor, Inc. (Nasdaq: TRIP), include a portfolio of travel brands and businesses, including Tripadvisor, Viator, and TheFork.
The Tripadvisor Experiences Engineering team is distributed across Europe and is responsible for Tripadvisor.com, the Tripadvisor mobile apps and all their supporting infrastructure. We run the systems that help operators build their businesses and those which enable third parties to utilise our inventory. We provide the tools which help our customer services team provide world class service to travellers and operators internationally.
We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our fast-growing team. This role is open to candidates based within a commutable distance (generally up to 1.5 hours) of our Cracow office. We embrace flexibility in where and how work gets done and also value meaningful in-person moments to connect and collaborate. You can expect a remote-first working model with periodic in-person gatherings at your closest office for team connection, planning, or other key moments.
This is a permanent contract of employment/Umowa o pracę.
What you’ll do:
- Drive the design and architecture of complex, scalable systems that underpin our technology solutions. Capable of designing long-lasting systems to solve complex problems (including scalability, reliability, consistency and quality) often across an engineering pillar.
- Conduct design reviews at both the engineering pillar level and across the broader engineering organization.
- Leads generalisable improvements in operational maturity for his platform and promotes best practices with other engineers when it comes to operations.
- Work closely with engineering managers, other principal and senior principal engineers to drive technology strategy and roadmap that aligns to the wider organisation vision.
- Partners with Product Manager(s) and Engineering Manager(s) to establish clear technical delivery milestones for key initiatives and then helps to drive delivery within the agreed scope, quality and on time.
- Build trusted leadership by being regarded as a go-to person across a wide number of technologies, practices, and tools used in an engineering pillar.
- Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders to ensure alignment on project goals, commitments, and timelines.
Skills & Experience:
- 10+ years of experience in commercial software development.
- Demonstrated excellence in working with cross functional teams in fast-paced environments, both in terms of technical leadership and cross team collaboration.
- Excellent command of tools and expertise for troubleshooting production issues.
- Experience around building scalable and distributed software systems, from conception to production.
- Experience of software architecture, design principles and engineering best practices.
- Experience with AWS or Azure cloud platforms, object-oriented programming languages such as Java, Python, or Scala, and working with both SQL and NoSQL databases.
- Exposure to the data engineering ecosystem will be a huge plus.
Why Join Us?
- Competitive compensation packages, including base salary and annual bonus.
- “Work your way” with flexibility to suit your lifestyle. We take a remote-friendly approach to collaboration, with the option to join on-site as often as you’d like in select locations.
- Flexible schedule. Work-life balance is ingrained in our culture by design. Trust and accountability make it work.
- Donation matching. Give back? Give more! We match qualifying charitable donations annually.
- Tuition assistance. Want to level up your career? We love to hear it! Receive annual support for qualified programs.
- Lifestyle benefit. An annual benefit to spend on yourself. Use it on travel, wellness, or whatever suits you.
- Travel perks. We believe that travel is employee development, so we provide discounts and more.
- Employee assistance program. We’re here for you with resources and programs to help you through life’s challenges.
- Health benefits. We offer great coverage and competitive premiums.
Perks of Working at Tripadvisor
- Competitive compensation packages, including base salary, annual bonus, and more.
- “Work your way” with flexibility to suit your lifestyle. We take a remote-friendly approach to collaboration, with the option to join on-site as often as you’d like in select locations.
- Flexible schedule. Work-life balance is ingrained in our culture by design. Trust and accountability make it work.
- Donation matching. Give back? Give more! We match qualifying charitable donations annually.
- Tuition assistance. Want to level up your career? We love to hear it! Receive annual support for qualified programs.
- Lifestyle benefit. An annual benefit to spend on yourself. Use it on travel, wellness, or whatever suits you.
- Travel perks. We believe that travel is employee development, so we provide discounts and more.
- Employee assistance program. We’re here for you with resources and programs to help you through life’s challenges.
- Health benefits. We offer great coverage and competitive premiums.
Our Cultural Pillars:
- Traveller first: We exist to create value for our customer, the traveler. We enable our suppliers and partners to unlock this value. Their collective behaviors and insights are what drives us.
- Execution is our edge: We act fast, experiment, learn from failure, iterate, and improve the solutions of tomorrow across every aspect of our business. Our execution is agile, data-driven, prioritised, and built to scale. We assume no problem is someone else’s problem and finish what can be done today, knowing tomorrow will bring fresh challenges.
- We succeed together: The best outcomes are driven by empathic, humble, and diverse subject matter experts working toward shared goals. We collaborate relentlessly, challenge assumptions, give actionable feedback, and set each other up for success through empowered teams with a clear charter. We transparently take ownership of our growth, individually and as a team. We celebrate the quality of our effort, our learnings, and our collective achievements.
We strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all candidates. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please make sure to reach out to your individual recruiter or our team at AccessibleRecruiting@tripadvisor.com.
If you have any additional questions about careers at Tripadvisor you can email us at recruitment@tripadvisor.com. We have all the answers!
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