Job Description
As Expedia Group accelerates its AI-driven transformation and expands globally, the ability to deliver truly local, high-quality experiences at scale has become a core competitive advantage.
The Globalization Platform Lead is a critical technical leadership role that ensures globalization is not a downstream activity, but a platform capability embedded into product development from day one. This role focuses on designing, deploying and maintaining the architecture of AI-enabled localization workflows, machine translation pipelines, and developer tooling that make it easier for product teams to launch globally.
This is a highly hands-on role for someone who enjoys building platforms, collaborating across teams, and shaping how global products are delivered.
Core responsibilities and deliverables:
1. Globalization Platforms & Architecture
* Design and implement services and workflows that support machine translation, localization automation, and multilingual content delivery.
* Contribute to technical designs and architecture reviews for globalization systems, including internal and external systems
* Translate product requirements into maintainable, scalable solutions.
* Help define technical standards and best practices for “global-by-default” development.
* Participate in quarterly planning & prioritization cycles and drives execution of assigned globalization initiatives.
2. AI/ML enablement
* Build integrations between LLMs, MT engines, and internal systems using APIs.
* Run technical experiments to test new AI-powered workflows, notably using Agentic AI.
* Engineer prompts and automation pipelines for AI-assisted localization.
* Leverage NLP/NLU techniques to improve localization automation, translation quality evaluation, and multilingual content understanding across Expedia Group experiences.
3. Machine Translation and linguistic systems
* Develop Python and/or AI-based tooling for MT evaluation, terminology extraction, and LQA automation.
* Maintain and improve MT pipelines and linguistic asset repositories.
* Work with our Analytics partners on building dashboards and reports from MT and TMS data sources.
* Partner with linguists and vendors to operationalize technical improvements.
4. Cross-functional delivery
* Collaborate with Product, UX, ML, and Platform teams to embed globalization early in the development lifecycle.
* Support workflow automation and process improvements.
* Help define success metrics and track business impact.
* Contribute to documentation and knowledge sharing for globalization tooling.
Functional/Technical Skills:
Required Experience
* 4–7 years of professional experience
* Strong programming skills (Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript)
* REST APIs, testing tools
* Regex and string handling
* Solid knowledge of Unicode, ICU & CLDR
* Working knowledge of NLP and NLU concepts: tokenization, embeddings, classification, sequence labeling, semantic similarity, intent/entity extraction
* Experience building production services, scripts, or internal platforms.
* Experience working with CI/CD pipelines and cloud environments.
Globalization & AI
* Solid knowledge of i18n, localization systems, globalization platforms, NMT engines.
* Strong literacy of LLM-based systems and prompt engineering.
* Experience in multilingual systems and experimentation.
* Working knowledge of NLU/NLP concepts
Architecture & Operations
* Experience contributing to system designs and technical reviews.
* Awareness of observability, monitoring, and reliability practices.
* Ability to troubleshoot production issues.
Collaboration & Communication
* Clear written and verbal communication skills.
* Comfortable working with global partners.
* Inclusive, collaborative approach to problem-solving.
Values & Leadership Competencies:
Customer first & Ownership
* Builds systems with traveler experience and quality at the core.
* Uses data to understand how global customers interact with products.
* Owns technical deliverables end-to-end within assigned projects.
* Flags risks early and proposes creative and when applicable, AI-based solutions.
Data-driven
* Defines measurable success criteria for globalization initiatives (quality, speed, cost, reliability, adoption) before building.
* Uses instrumentation and experimentation to validate whether AI/MT workflows improve outcomes vs. existing approaches
* Builds feedback loops so production data informs model/tooling improvements (e.g., post-edit data, LQA outcomes, customer signals).
* Makes tradeoffs transparently (e.g., cost vs. quality, latency vs. coverage) using evidence, not opinions.
* Operationalizes metrics into dashboards/alerts that teams can use without manual analysis.
Bias for action
* Ships incrementally, learns from results, and iterates quickly.
* Prototypes new ideas before scaling them.
* Ability to simplify complex systems and deploy clear, scalable and maintainable architectures.
* Works effectively across disciplines and geographies.
* Communicates clearly with both technical and non-technical partners.
Learning & Growth mindset
* Stays current on AI + globalization trends: keeps up with developments in LLMs, MT/NMT, evaluation methods, prompt/agent patterns, terminology management, and content quality practices
* Demonstrates a repeatable approach to learning: read, experiment, measure, operationalize.
* Can articulate trade-offs and “why” behind decisions, not just “how.”
* Converts new ideas into reliable tooling, standards, and best practices adopted by product teams.
* Builds personal credibility across disciplines by speaking both engineering and localization/linguistic perspectives.