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:
About Us
At Southwest Airlines, we believe that flying should feel like freedom. For over 50 years, we’ve been connecting people to what matters most with low fares, legendary hospitality, and a heart for service. Our culture is built on the principles of fun, friendliness, and family, making us one of the most admired workplaces in the world.
If you’re passionate about making a difference, love working in a fast-paced environment, and want to help millions of travelers reach their destinations with a smile, Southwest Airlines is the place for you. Here, your career can truly take flight.
As a Software Engineer Global supporting the AI Platform Operations Pod with a Cloud Operations focus, you’ll help ensure Southwest’s AI and agentic workloads run reliably in real production environments. This role emphasizes hands‑on cloud operations and reliability—serving as an L1/L2 first responder for AWS‑based AI services while partnering with Sr Engineers to troubleshoot issues, restore service, and implement improvements. You’ll work directly with AWS platforms such as Lambda, EKS, CloudWatch, and IAM, applying automation and scripting to streamline operations, support on‑call rotations, and reduce repeat incidents. Through day‑to‑day exposure to production systems, you’ll strengthen your cloud and operational skills while gaining practical experience supporting AI technologies, including LLMs, vector databases, and agentic frameworks. This role offers a strong foundation for engineers who want to grow into cloud and AI platform operations while contributing to systems that must perform at scale, every day.
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
- 3+ years in production support / cloud ops on AWS—incidents, on-call rotation
- 3+ years in Python or Java for ops scripting and L2 fixes
- 2+ years in Cloud-native AWS—Lambda, ECS, S3, DynamoDB, IAM
- 2+ years in Observability tools—reading logs, metrics, traces (Datadog/CloudWatch)
- 2+ years in Incident response, ticket triage, and escalation handling
- Preferred: Experience in:
- Exposure to AI/agentic frameworks or LLM APIs
- Familiarity with on-call and ticket lifecycle (ServiceNow/Jira)
- Familiarity with Linux internals and networking
- Docker fundamentals
- Basic scripting for ops automation (Python/Bash)
- Agentic AI Development Lifecycle
- Deploy AWS AI Tools (Bedrock, AgentCore)
- AI Infrastructure using Terraform or other IAC
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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