Sr Software Engineer – AI Ops

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 Southwest’s AI Platform Operations Pod, you’ll play a critical role in ensuring AI and agentic applications run reliably, securely, and at scale. This role blends deep hands‑on engineering with technical leadership—owning L2/L3 production support for cloud‑native and AI‑enabled services while driving permanent improvements that reduce repeat incidents over time. You’ll design, build, test, and operate highly reliable software systems, applying strong debugging, observability, and SRE practices to quickly diagnose issues and deliver durable fixes. Working deeply with AWS‑native services and modern monitoring and evaluation tools, you’ll help evolve platform capabilities through enhancements that improve stability, performance, and service levels. You’ll also mentor other Engineers and promote “shift‑left” quality by strengthening testing, automation, and operational readiness. This role offers the opportunity to work on real production systems, influence long‑term reliability, and help ensure Southwest’s AI platforms continue to deliver value as they grow and 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: 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 Production support / SRE for cloud or AI/ML applications

• 4+ years using strong Python or Java—debugging, profiling, fixing production issues

• 3+ 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:

• Fin Ops for AI inference (cost-per-call, token economics)

• Eval frameworks (Ragas, Deep Eval, Promptfoo) for AI features

• Back-office workflow automation experience

• Hands-on with agentic frameworks (Lang Chain/Lang Graph/CrewAI) in support context

• Docker + Kubernetes for AI workloads

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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