Principal Software Engineer

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 the platform, 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.

About the Role

We're looking for a Principal Product Engineer who pairs deep engineering craft with strong product instincts. You'll work across the stack - mobile, web, backend - wherever the highest-leverage problem happens to live that quarter. You don't wait for a perfectly scoped ticket; you partner with product, design, and data to figure out what's worth building, then ship it end-to-end.

We expect breadth. We also expect real depth in the mobile app ecosystem - our customer-facing experiences live there. But we're not hiring a mobile only specialist. We're hiring a generalist with mobile chops who can lead an iOS architecture review on Tuesday and untangle a backend latency regression on Wednesday.

This role is open to candidates based within a commutable distance (generally up to 1.5 hours) of Lisbon, however we also offer flexible hybrid working.

What you will do

• Identify, scope, and ship the changes that move business metrics - across mobile, web, services, and data layers
• Architect long-lasting systems that hold up under real production conditions: performance, reliability, scalability, offline behavior, consistency
• Lead technical design reviews across teams, weighing trade-offs not just in code but in product impact, time-to-ship, and operational cost
• Drive operational maturity wherever it's weakest - release management, observability, incident response, performance monitoring - including in the mobile apps
• Partner with PMs, designers, and engineering leaders to shape what we build, why, and in what order; you're a peer in those conversations, not a downstream implementer
• Set the technical bar for the org by example: write the prototype, prove the pattern, then teach it
• Communicate trade-offs clearly to engineers, product partners, and senior stakeholders

What we’re looking for

• 10+ years of software experience, with significant time still spent hands-on in code - track record of shipping product-impacting work end-to-end, not just owning a layer
• Real depth in the mobile app ecosystem (iOS and/or Android, with strong fluency in Swift and/or Kotlin and the surrounding ecosystem - offline sync, push, auth, persistence, networking, REST/GraphQL) - and credible breadth beyond it
• Demonstrated breadth: you've worked seriously in at least one of {web frontend, backend services, data/infra, platform tooling} alongside mobile, and can hold your own in code review there
• Strong product judgment: you've made calls about what not to build, and can defend them with evidence
• Comfort troubleshooting in production across stacks - crash analysis, latency tracing, release-health debugging
• Excellent cross-functional collaboration; you make the people around you better.