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 the AI Platforms Pod with an SRE focus, you’ll help ensure the reliability, scalability, and operational health of the core platforms that power Southwest’s AI and machine learning capabilities. In this role, you’ll apply SRE fundamentals such as SLOs, incident management, and automation to cloud‑native services, partnering closely with Platform and Product Teams to embed reliability into the platform lifecycle. You’ll work hands‑on with AWS services, container platforms, and Infrastructure as Code to build repeatable, self‑healing infrastructure patterns that reduce downtime and improve trust in platform services. Through monitoring, incident response, and continuous improvement, you’ll help ensure AI platforms remain observable, resilient, and ready to scale as usage grows. This role offers the opportunity to grow strong SRE and cloud engineering skills while contributing to the foundations that enable faster, safer AI innovation across Southwest.
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:
- SRE fundamentals: SLOs/SLIs, incident management, on-call, postmortems
- AWS operations (CloudWatch, CloudTrail, IAM, VPC) and troubleshooting
- Automation/scripting (Python/Bash) and infrastructure automation
- IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation/CDK) for repeatable environments
- Container/platform ops (EKS/ECS) and scaling
- Performance and capacity planning + cost awareness
- Preferred: Experience in:
- Chaos engineering / resilience testing
- Security operations familiarity (vuln mgmt, least privilege audits)
- Experience supporting ML/GenAI inference endpoints (SageMaker/Bedrock)
- Runbook automation and ChatOps
- Observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana) alongside CloudWatch
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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