Department:
Technology
Our Company Promise
We are committed to provide our Employees a stable work environment with equal opportunity for learning and personal growth. Creativity and innovation are encouraged for improving the effectiveness of Southwest Airlines. Above all, Employees will be provided the same concern, respect, and caring attitude within the organization that they are expected to share externally with every Southwest Customer.
Job Description:
As a Software Engineer Global supporting Southwest’s AI Platform Operations Pod, you’ll help keep AI and agentic applications running reliably in real production environments. This role focuses on operating and supporting AWS‑based AI workloads at the L1/L2 level—serving as a first responder for production issues while partnering with Sr Engineers to diagnose problems and deliver effective fixes. You’ll work hands‑on with cloud‑native services, observability tools, and automation to monitor system health, respond to incidents, and improve reliability over time. Through day‑to‑day production exposure, you’ll grow your skills across AWS operations, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and SRE fundamentals, while gaining practical experience with AI technologies such as LLMs, vector databases, and agentic frameworks. This role offers a strong foundation for engineers who want to build deep operational expertise while contributing to AI platforms that must perform consistently at scale.
Responsibilities
- Apply knowledge and skills of software development and testing effectively to solve a range of problems
- Work alongside other engineers on the team to elevate technology and consistently apply best practices
- Collaborate closely with customers and cross-functional departments to communicate project statuses and proposals
- Document each aspect of a system or application as a reference for future upgrades and maintenance
- Determine and assess the needs of the user and then create software to meet the requirements
- Identify and resolve issues that arise during the design, testing and maintenance processes using problem-solving skills
- Work in an agile environment to deliver high-quality software
- Prepare and install solutions by determining and designing system specifications, standards, and programming
- Mentor junior members on the team
- Improve and expand technical capabilities by continuing their education thru reading, workshops, conferences, and/or communities of practice
- May perform other job duties as directed by Employee's Leaders
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
- Intermediate knowledge of software development methodologies, practices, concepts, and technologies obtained through formal training and / or work experience
- Ability to demonstrate consistent knowledge application, skills of software development, and testing to solve a range of problems
- Intermediate knowledge of at least one required programming language
- Ability to partner, communicate, and negotiate with various Technology or partner Teams
- Ability to analyze and manage large, complex, and vague Business or technical problems, articulating the problem or root cause, and translating the analysis into viable solution recommendations
- Ability to take on multiple assignments, whether administrative or project related, while maintaining a successful level of completion in all responsible work
- Ability to mentor others to do the same
- Ability to develop, present and effectively communicate ideas and strategies to a variety of audiences
Education
- Required: Required: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or related field and/or equivalent formal training
Experience
Required: Intermediate-level experience, fully functioning broad knowledge in software engineering
2-5 years of relevant work-related experience
5+ years in production support / SRE for cloud or AI/ML applications
4+ years in strong Python or Java—debugging, profiling, fixing production issues
4+ years in Cloud-native AWS—Lambda, ECS/EKS, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3
3+ years in Observability—Datadog/CloudWatch/OTel, log/metric/trace analysis
3+ years in CI/CD, IaC basics (Terraform), and SRE practices—SLOs, error budgets
Preferred: Experience in:
Hands-on with agentic frameworks (LangChain/LangGraph/CrewAI) in support context
Eval frameworks (Ragas, DeepEval, Promptfoo) for AI features
Docker + Kubernetes for AI workloads
FinOps for AI inference (cost-per-call, token economics)
Back-office workflow automation experience
Other Qualifications
- Must meet confidentiality expectations as to confidential, proprietary and sensitive Company information
- Ability to work extended hours as needed
Southwest Airlines is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
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