Department:TechnologyOur Company PromiseWe 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 UsAt 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 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.ResponsibilitiesDrive the technical direction and feature roadmap of large-scale cloud systemsServe as a technical lead contributing to and directing the efforts of development teams, including internal and external team membersDetermines operational feasibility by evaluating analysis, problem definition, requirements, solution development, and proposed solutionsDrives detailed definition of feature requirements through discussions with product managers and customersSupports continuous improvement by investigating alternatives and new technologiesPrepares and installs solutions by determining and designing system specifications, standards, and programmingEvaluates code to ensure that it is valid, is properly structured, meets industry standards, and is compatible with browsers, devices, or operating systemsMentor Software Engineers to allow for skill/knowledge development through advice, coaching, and training opportunitiesUpdate 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 organizationsMay perform other job duties as directed by Employee's LeadersKnowledge, Skills and AbilitiesAdvanced knowledge of software development methodologies, practices, concepts, and technologies obtained through formal training and / or work experienceProactively shares knowledge and skills of software development and testing to solve a range of problemsAdvanced knowledge of at least one required programming languageExcellent partnering, communication, negotiation skills, and execution in working with various Technology or partner TeamsAbility to articulate (verbally / visually) ideas, approach, concepts, options, risk, impact, and provides guidance to technical, non-technical, and Leadership audiencesAbility to lead multiple assignments, whether administrative or project related, while maintaining a successful level of completion in all responsible workAbility to mentor othersAbility to lead ideating, presentations, mentoring and group-thinking sessionsAbility to influence without authorityEducationRequired: Required: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or related field and/or equivalent formal trainingExperienceRequired: Advanced-level experience, seasoned and specialized knowledge in: Software development and methodologies5-7 years of relevant work-related experience5+ years in Production support / SRE for cloud or AI/ML applications4+ years using strong Python —debugging, profiling, fixing production issues3+ years in Cloud-native AWS—Lambda, ECS/EKS, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S33+ years in Observability—Datadog/CloudWatch/OTel, log/metric/trace analysis3+ years in CI/CD, IaC basics (Terraform), and SRE practices—SLOs, error budgetsPreferred: Experience in:FinOps for AI inference (cost-per-call, token economics)Eval frameworks (Ragas, DeepEval, Promptfoo) for AI featuresBack-office workflow automation experienceHands-on with agentic frameworks (LangChain/LangGraph/CrewAI) in support contextDocker + Kubernetes for AI workloadsOther QualificationsMust meet confidentiality expectations as to confidential, proprietary and sensitive Company informationAbility to work extended hours as neededSouthwest Airlines is an Equal Opportunity Employer.Please print/save this job description because it won't be available after you apply.