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 Sr Software Engineer Global supporting the AI Platform Operations Pod with a Cloud Ops focus, you’ll help ensure Southwest’s AI and agentic platforms operate reliably, securely, and efficiently at scale. This role combines deep cloud engineering with SRE practices, owning L2/L3 operations for production AI workloads on AWS while driving automation and resilience across distributed systems. You’ll work hands‑on with cloud‑native services and containerized platforms—using Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD pipelines, and strong observability practices to detect issues early, respond effectively to incidents, and deliver permanent improvements that reduce repeat failures. Partnering closely with AI Platform, Security, and Product Teams, you’ll balance reliability, cost, and security for non‑deterministic AI systems—an emerging and high‑impact discipline. You’ll also mentor other Engineers and promote “shift‑left” quality by strengthening runbooks, alerts, testing, and operational readiness, helping ensure Southwest’s AI platforms continue to deliver consistent value as they evolve.Responsibilities
- Drive the technical direction and feature roadmap of large-scale cloud systems
- Serve as a technical lead contributing to and directing the efforts of development teams, including internal and external team members
- Determines operational feasibility by evaluating analysis, problem definition, requirements, solution development, and proposed solutions
- Drives detailed definition of feature requirements through discussions with product managers and customers
- Supports continuous improvement by investigating alternatives and new technologies
- Prepares and installs solutions by determining and designing system specifications, standards, and programming
- Evaluates code to ensure that it is valid, is properly structured, meets industry standards, and is compatible with browsers, devices, or operating systems
- Mentor Software Engineers to allow for skill/knowledge development through advice, coaching, and training opportunities
- Update job knowledge by studying state-of-the-art development tools, programming techniques and computing equipment; participating in educational opportunities; reading professional publications; maintaining personal networks; participating in professional organizations
- May perform other job duties as directed by Employee's Leaders
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
- Advanced knowledge of software development methodologies, practices, concepts, and technologies obtained through formal training and / or work experience
- Proactively shares knowledge and skills of software development and testing to solve a range of problems
- Advanced knowledge of at least one required programming language
- Excellent partnering, communication, negotiation skills, and execution in working with various Technology or partner Teams
- Ability to articulate (verbally / visually) ideas, approach, concepts, options, risk, impact, and provides guidance to technical, non-technical, and Leadership audiences
- Ability to lead multiple assignments, whether administrative or project related, while maintaining a successful level of completion in all responsible work
- Ability to mentor others
- Ability to lead ideating, presentations, mentoring and group-thinking sessions
- Ability to influence without authority
Education
- Required: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or related field and/or equivalent formal training
Experience
- Required: Advanced-level experience, seasoned and specialized knowledge in software development and methodologies
- 3+ years in Incident response—blameless post-mortems, RCA, MTTR reduction
- 3+ years in Observability—Datadog/CloudWatch/OTel, dashboards, alerts, runbooks
- 4+ years in Cloud-native AWS—EKS/ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, networking
- 4+ years in strong Python or Java for ops automation and L3 fixes
- 5+ years in production support / SRE on AWS at scale—incidents, on-call, SLOs
- 5-6 years of relevant work-related experience
- Preferred: Experience in:
- Hands-on AWS Bedrock/SageMaker ops
- GPU infra ops—batching, autoscaling, cost tuning
- IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation) hands-on
- Service mesh (Istio/App Mesh), API GW, WAF
- Secure ops for PII/regulated data
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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