Principal Software Engineer (Guest Communications Platform)

Job Description

The Principal Engineer, Guest Communications Platform serves as the technical authority and hands-on architectural leader for Marriott's next-generation Guest Communications Platform. This role is responsible for defining, governing, and evolving a cloud-native, event-driven, provider-agnostic communications platform that reliably delivers Email, SMS, Chat, and future channels to Bonvoy members and hotel guests globally.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role with broad influence across product, platform, DevOps, and partner engineering teams. The Principal Engineer sets technical direction, drives architectural consistency, ensures reliability at scale, and mentors engineering teams to deliver mission-critical guest communications with zero regression from legacy systems.

As a Principal Software Engineer within our Guest Communications Platform teams, you will:

• Own the end-to-end technical architecture for the Guest Communications Platform, including ingestion, orchestration, delivery, observability, and recovery.

• Define and enforce architectural standards and design principles across all guest communications services.

• Lead architectural decisions related to event-driven systems, Kafka-centric integration, stateless channel services, and provider abstraction layers.

• Serve as the final technical escalation point for complex architectural, scalability, resiliency, and performance challenges.

• Lead the technical strategy for modernizing and retiring legacy guest communication applications while ensuring no message loss, no customer impact, and no operational regression.

• Design and oversee backward-compatible adapters and phased migration patterns that enable coexistence of legacy and modern systems.

• Partner with Product and Delivery teams to sequence migrations safely and predictably.

• Establish platform-wide standards for resiliency, fault tolerance, DR, idempotency, deduplication, and recovery automation.

• Ensure observability by default, including metrics, dashboards, alerting, tracing, and operational visibility across regions and providers.

• Act as a technical mentor and coach for senior and mid-level engineers across the Guest Communications domain.

• Review and guide critical designs, PRs, and technical proposals for platform-wide impact.

• Raise the bar on code quality, operational readiness, security, and performance engineering.

• Clearly communicate architectural trade-offs and technical risks to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

About You

You are a technical leader with enthusiasm for team success. You "think outside of the box" and have talent for creating usable, scalable, well-tested software. You want to work in a highly collaborative, agile, and respectful environment. You love learning new technologies, languages, tools, and you have a passion for building frameworks.

Basic Qualifications - Principal Software Engineer

• 8+ years of professional software design and development experience with expert level expertise in multiple programming languages like Java, Spring Boot, JavaScript, TypeScript, NodeJS

• Proven experience building microservices-based backend systems using Java and Spring Boot

• Experience supporting workflows and integrations using Adobe I/O, Adobe Campaign and related Adobe tooling for real-time and batch orchestration.

• Knowledge of content management systems like Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and other Adobe tools like Adobe AEP/AJO, AEM Templates, Adobe MTA

• Is preferred

• Strong experience designing cloud-native, distributed systems for large-scale, customer-facing platforms

• Hands-on expertise with event-driven architectures and streaming platforms (Kafka preferred)

• Experience using GraphQL and REST

• Experience in using testing framework such as Playwright, Jest, Jasmine, Mocha, or Junit

• Experience designing and operating high-volume messaging or notification platforms (Email, SMS, Chat)

• Experience with AI coding and productivity tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor) and applying validation best practices

• Strong knowledge in performance optimization techniques

• Strong understanding of reliability and resiliency patterns (retries, idempotency, failover, DR)

• Solid experience with AWS cloud services, containerization, and Kubernetes (EKS preferred)

• Hands-on knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices (GitHub, Harness/Jenkins/GitHub Actions, IaC)

• Experience with observability and production monitoring tools

• Working knowledge of security best practices for cloud and service-to-service communication

Other Qualifications

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially when it comes to conveying technical concepts to audiences at all levels.

• Ability to mentor and learn from other team members through pairing, code reviews, and documentation.

• Experience with monitoring and performance analysis and code quality metrics coupled with a drive for code quality and encouraging peers to elevate their craft.

• An unbridled curiosity and interest in problem solving and iterative development.

• Constant drive to complete projects and to overcome roadblocks with positivity and creativity.

• Hands-on experience with crafting robust unit tests and working with continuous integration and deployment pipelines.

• You aren't afraid to course correct anti-patterns you've noticed within the team.

At Marriott International, we are dedicated to being an equal opportunity employer, welcoming all and providing access to opportunity. We actively foster an environment where the unique backgrounds of our associates are valued and celebrated. Our greatest strength lies in the rich blend of culture, talent, and experiences of our associates. We are committed to non-discrimination on any protected basis, including disability, veteran status, or other basis protected by applicable law.

About Us

All positions offer a 401(k) plan, stock purchase plan, discounts at Marriott properties, commuter benefits, employee assistance plan, and childcare discounts. Benefits are subject to terms and conditions, which may include rules regarding eligibility, enrollment, waiting period, contribution, benefit limits, election changes, benefit exclusions, and others. Click here to learn more.

Full-time positions also offer coverage for medical, dental, vision, health care flexible spending account, dependent care flexible spending account, life insurance, disability insurance, accident insurance, adoption expense reimbursements, paid parental leave and educational assistance.

Washington Applicants Only: Employees will accrue paid sick leave, 0.077 PTO balance for every hour worked and be eligible to receive a minimum of 9 holidays annually.

Marriott HQ is committed to a hybrid work environment that enables associates to Be connected. Headquarters-based positions are considered hybrid, for candidates within a commuting distance to Bethesda, MD; candidates outside of commuting distance to Bethesda, MD will be considered for Remote positions.

About the Team

Marriott International is the world's largest hotel company, with more brands, more hotels and more opportunities for associates to grow and succeed. Be where you can do your best work, begin your purpose, belong to an amazing global team, and become the best version of you.