Sr Software Engineer - Quality

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 Agentic AI – Customer & Commercial Pod with a Quality focus, you’ll lead the quality assurance strategy for AI‑driven Customer experiences that simplify how Customers get help, explore options, and complete transactions. This role owns end‑to‑end quality for agentic AI solutions, including complex, multi‑agent workflows operating in production environments. You’ll design and execute comprehensive testing strategies that validate resiliency, reliability, accuracy, latency, orchestration correctness, and scalability—partnering closely with Engineering, Platform, and Operations Teams from development through production. Working hands‑on with cloud‑native services, observability tooling, and CI/CD pipelines, you’ll build automation frameworks and reusable test assets, drive macro‑level validation across evolving AI workflows, and help prevent production issues through strong “shift‑left” quality practices. This role offers the opportunity to shape how Southwest delivers trustworthy, high‑quality agentic AI experiences at scale, while mentoring engineers and establishing quality standards that grow alongside our AI capabilities.

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

  • 5-7 years of relevant work-related experience

  • 5+ years in Software QA/Testing, with 2+ years in AI/ML or LLM-based systems; hands-on experience testing agentic/multi-agent architectures

  • Strong programming skills in Python or TypeScript/JavaScript; experience building test harnesses, simulators, and fixtures.

  • Experience with LLM evaluation (exact/soft match, BLEU/ROUGE, BERTScore, semantic similarity via embeddings), guardrails, and prompt testing.

  • Agentic AI performance/ Load testing experience and Agentic AI defect life cycle and defect triage experience

  • Expertise in distributed systems testing, latency profiling, resiliency patterns (circuit breakers, retries), chaos engineering, and message queues.

Preferred: Experience in

• Prior ownership of cost/latency/SLAs for AI workloads in production
• Knowledge of MLOps (model versioning, datasets, evaluation pipelines) and A/B experimentation for LLMs.
• Background in cloud (AWS), serverless, containerization, and event-driven architectures.
• Multi-agent simulators, agent graph testing, and tooling latency emulation
• Building test harnesses, simulators, and fixtures

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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